Julia Boyd

Areas of Specialization
Postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities; postcolonial and world literatures; Indigenous literatures; writer-activism; socially engaged humanities; social justice education and critical pedagogy

Courses Taught
ENG100H Effective Writing
ENG104H Literature and Social Change
ENG202H British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century
ENG259H Imagining Nature: Literature and the Environment
ENG370H Global Literatures in English
ENG371H Transnational Environmental Literature and Film (St. George)
ENG426H Indigenous and Diasporic Environmental Literature and Film
 

Biography
Julia A. Boyd is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of English & Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she was previously the Chair’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Public Humanities. She received her PhD in English from the University of Toronto, where her work was supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, and her dissertation received the 2023 A.S.P. Woodhouse Prize for best thesis in the Department of English. Julia’s research explores transnational writer-activism and socio-environmental justice movements, alongside social justice education and interdisciplinary humanities curricula. Her work appears in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, Jeunesse, and New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (Routledge, 2020).

Julia is also enthusiastically committed to the publicly engaged humanities. She has run an academic leadership and university prep program for high school students, and here at UTM, she and her students co-founded and run Literature Is ALIVE!, a collaborative and event series that brings students, faculty, and staff together for inspiring gatherings about the practical career benefits, interdisciplinary connections, and real world social and environmental impacts of studying English and writing in university. She recently received a UTM Postdoctoral Leadership Award for her teaching and work with LIA!. In the rare moments Julia isn’t happily burrowed in a pile of books, she’s likely outside admiring the local earth community (book in hand).

To find out more about LIA! and join our mailing list, follow us on Instagram at @utmliteratureisalive

Publications
Refereed Articles and Book Chapter:

“ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernism and the Writing of Nuclear Resistance.” In New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific, edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long, 39–59. New York: Routledge, 2020.

“Black Rainbow, Blood-Earth: Speaking the Nuclearized Pacific in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52, no. 6 (2016): 672–86.

“‘Fugitive Visions’: Cultural Pseudomemory and the Death of the Indigenous Child in the Indian Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) 40, no. 2 (2016): 143–63.

“Environmental Heroism and the Power of Storytelling in the Novels and Papers of Brian Doyle: ‘The infinite family of organisms.’” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8, no. 2 (2016): 89–118.

Book Reviews:

Rev. of The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism, by Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward, Columbia University Press, 2024. Postcolonial Text 20, no. 2 (2025).

Rev. of Activating the Heart: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing, and Relationship, edited by Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox, and Lisa Szabo-Jones, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018. Native American and Indigenous Studies 7, no. 2 (2020): 188–9.

Rev. of If You’re Not Free at Work, Where are You Free? Literature and Social Change: Selected Essays and Interviews, 1994–2014, by Tom Wayman, Guernica Editions, 2018. Letters in Canada 2018, special issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2020): 619–20.

Rev. of Classroom Action: Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education, edited by Ajay Heble, University of Toronto Press, 2017. Letters in Canada 2017, special issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 88, no. 3 (2019): 196–7.

Rev. of Challenging Stories: Canadian Literature for Social Justice in the Classroom, edited by Anne Burke, Ingrid Johnston, and Angela Ward, Canadian Scholars, 2017. Letters in Canada 2017, special issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 88, no. 3 (2019): 189–90.