Dear DEVS commmunity,
It is with great sadness that we share the following obituary of our colleague Professor Emerita Dr. Karen Dubinsky. Karen was a dynamic researcher and pedagogical innovator. Her award-winning course Cuban Culture and Society was a staple of the DEVS curriculum and took several generations of our students to Havana for an educational experience unlike any other. Her passing is far too soon, but her profound legacy in DEVS will continue.
Please find below a full obituary prepared by Dr. Scott Rutherford and Dr. Susan Lord that curates Karen's great impact upon academia and the Queen’s community.
- Marcus Taylor, Head of Department
Karen Dubinsky passed away on Friday, September 4th, 2026, from a recently diagnosed illness. Professor Emerita of Global Development Studies, she was a colleague, a friend, an intellectual co-conspirator, a fellow traveler, a teacher and mentor for many at Queen’s and beyond. After graduating from Carleton University with her BA and MA, Karen completed her PhD in History at Queen’s in 1991. Karen had brief teaching stints at the University of Toronto, Carleton University and McMaster University before taking a tenure-track appointment in 1993 in the History Department at Queen’s University. She was jointly appointed to the Department of Global Development Studies in 2010. Her retirement from Queen’s in July 2025 did nothing to slow down her down, as until her untimely passing she was doing research for a new book “Cuban Roots on Canadian Soil: A History of Cuban Musicians in Canada.”
She reinvented herself as a historian at every turn – from Canadian gender and feminist history to queer tourism, to transnational adoption to Cuba-Canada cultural relations, and many other collaborations all along the way: edited books on the global 1960s, on transnational history, on Cuban musicians, and global development studies in Canada. As her mentor and friend, Dr Roberta Hamilton said at Karen’s retirement event last year:
“For in her research and teaching she has never stood still—and her shifting theoretical perspectives find their way lightly but cleverly to inform her substantive work. Which always makes her work so enlightening, surprising, and interesting. Take the first of her sole-authored book: Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario 1880-1929. … Amazingly undated given the huge swings in theoretical approaches, Karen’s study intertwines sex/gender, race, sexuality, patriarchy, morality and the social construction not just of femininity but also of masculinity, until then seen as simply the norm. More than all this she shows what became her signature style in all her work: telling a good story.”
The scope of her imagination was unparalleled, matched only by the most careful eye for detail, whether in the archives or in interviews. She gathered readers from across many borders. As professor David Austin (author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal, among numerous other titles) wrote about Karen’s book Cuba Beyond the Beach: “By cutting away at the debilitating romance, clichés, and dense propaganda that often characterizes narratives about Cuba, this wonderfully rich book provides the reader with a rare glimpse into a Cuba that continues to capture our imaginations, even as we somewhat nervously witness its dramatic history unfold.” American political commentator Ben Rhodes, who as a close Obama aide came to Canada to help steer US talks with Cuba, recently wrote to Karen about her new award winning book, Strangely Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters: “What really stood out to me was how you told this history through individual, intimate portraits rather than abstract diplomacy teachers, artists, and musicians whose personal choices to cross borders quietly built something that outlasted political ideology. It felt intentional, generous, and carefully researched in a way that's hard to pull off without truly valuing the human stories underneath the larger geopolitical narrative. I especially appreciated the throughline from the classrooms of Havana to the jazz clubs of Toronto it gives the book a rhythm that mirrors its subject, tracing connection through music and education rather than just tracking state policy. Those are the moments that separate a good history from one that actually lingers in a reader's mind.”
This intentional and generous research was foundational to the spirit and labour of the course, Cuban Culture and Society, which she co-taught in a 15 year collaboration between Queen’s and the University of Havana. The course won two awards, took over 350 students to Cuba, and became a model of reciprocity and experiential learning. The exchange brought over 20 scholars, musicians, filmmakers, artists and curators from Cuba to Queen’s to participate in on-campus and community activities. Several Cubans undertook their MAs and PhDs at Queen’s as a result of the deep relationships cultivated through the research Karen and others developed over decades. Karen also opened the door for Cuban-Canadian artist Harry Tanner’s papers to be held in the Queen’s Archives; and spearheaded Honorary Doctorates for Cuban musicians Carlos Varela and Alex Cuba.
Her teaching and supervision were a lifelong commitment to curiosity, to helping students generate new ideas and ways of expressing critical understandings of the world around them. This reverence for learning was evident in the attention she gave students–from first year undergraduates on up–who showed an interest in learning beyond the boundaries of normative thought and practice. For Karen, asking and answering questions often required going far beyond the “either/or” to find deeper, muddier truths–a lesson she shared with the thousands of students who she taught over 32 years in the classroom.
During Karen’s retirement event, former students Bay Ryley and Dave Seglins said, “We are the love children of HIST 565. We got married a few years later and had two of our own little ‘love children of HIST 565’." Their eldest, Amy, has just started third year at Queen’s. As Bay also noted about Karen: “The obvious love of her own work made her outstanding as an advisor and teacher. What is more inspiring than a writer who loves to write, a historian who loves history and their research, and a teacher who loves what and whom they are teaching? One wanted to write to impress. Not out of fear or obligation. I wrote for Karen and so I desired to do my very best.”
While Karen’s lists of accomplishments can seem like dry numbers in comparison to her wit, insight, and impact, it is important to provide some sense of scope, beginning with the recognition that she was deeply committed to wide and public knowledge-sharing, including decisions to publish and co-publishing four books with Between the Lines Press, and publishing in Cuba and in translation so that the communities she is connected to can share a space of complex communication and the hope that comes from it.
- Five self-authored books
- Five co-edited books
- 50 articles
- Over 30 pieces of popular writing and media appearances
- 13 episodes of Cuban Serenade Podcast (with Freddy Monasterio)
- Two-years of bi-weekly CFRC podcasts on Cuban Canadian music
- 12 Keynote Lectures including the 40th Annual Archives Lecture (2022)
- 47 MA students
- 28 PhD students
- Graduate supervision award 2007 and 2 further nominations.
- Co-editor, (with Franca Iacovetta) University of Toronto Press "Gender and History" series (since 1995) 39 titles published.
- Advisory Board of Cuban Studies and numerous other professional organizations
- 2026 Wilson Book Prize for “Strangely, Friends”: A History of Cuban Canadian Encounters (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2025).
- 2000 Albert B. Corey Prize, presented jointly by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association, for The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls
- She co-directed the long-standing public lecture series Studies in National and International Development (3 separate times).
- She was a practicing concert producer who brought Cuban musicians to the Isabel and The Grad Club, complementing her patronage of the musical arts of bars, taverns, and music clubs.
She leaves behind her partner Susan Belyea and her son Jordi Belyea-Dubinsky and an international village of family and friends.