Kristin Moriah is an Associate Professor of African American Literary Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center where she was the recipient of the Melvin Dixon Prize for the best dissertation in African American Studies. She is the most recent recipient of the Marie Tremaine Fellowship from the Bibliographic Society of Canada. Dr. Moriah was the 2022 recipient of the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Prize. She was a 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Black Digital Research. From 2021-2023 she was the co-director of the Black Studies Summer Institute, a joint initiative between Queen’s University and the University of Toronto which sought to advance Black Studies in Canada at the graduate level. She is the editor of Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first collection of scholarly essays about radical Black feminist editor and activist Mary Ann Shadd Caryc. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center. Her research and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, TDR, PAJ, Early American Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Matters and Sounding Out.
African American literature and culture; Black Studies; Sound Studies; Performance Studies
Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary
The first collection of essays (Pennsylvania Press, 2025) published on trailblazing nineteenth-century Black feminist, activist, journal, and educator, Mary Ann Shadd Cary.
The volume focuses particularly on three main topics: Shadd Cary’s relationship to immigration, nation, and colonization; the Black creative and nation-building work that Shadd Cary has inspired; and contemporary research methodologies like digital humanities as they can be used to better understand Shadd Cary’s moment, impacts, and life. Through a multi- and interdisciplinary lens, the collection celebrates Shadd Cary’s cultural significance and intellectual contributions, as well as their reverberations in her time and in ours.
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
- 2023 “Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives.” American Quarterly, June 2023. (Invited)
- 2023 “That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It: Hearing Blackness,” English Studies in Canada/ESC 46.2–3. (June/September 2023): 33–37. (Invited)
- 2022 “What Will We Do with All That Data?” American Periodicals. (Invited Forum Introduction)
- 2021 “On the Record: Sissieretta Jones and Black Feminist Recording Praxes.” Sound Acts special issue of Performance Matters 6.2. February 2021.
- 2020 “A Rude Sound: Notes on Suck Teeth Composition,” Sound and Performance special issue of Canadian Theatre Review 184. October 2020. (Invited)
- 2020 “A Greater Compass of Voice: Black Feminist Performance and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century North America.” Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands special issue of Theatre Research in Canada 41.1, June 2020. pp. 20-38.
BOOK CHAPTERS
- 2023 “Another Link to Life”: Black Feminist Geography, the Digital Humanities and in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Teaching Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Lynn Domina. Modern Language Association (forthcoming).
- 2023 “From Ballad Opera to Minstrelsy: Interrogating Social Class, Race, Gender, and Nation on the Musical Stage,” in The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre. Ed. Ryan Donovan and Laura MacDonald. (Invited)
- 2022 “Sounding Black Print Culture at the Edges of the Black Atlantic.” New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture. Ed. Jesse W. Schwartz and Daniel Worden. Bloomsbury. (Invited)
I am interested in supervising graduate students with strongly articulated research interests in Black Studies, Sound Studies, Performance Studies and African American Literature.
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS & GRANTS
FELLOWSHIPS
- 2024 Bibliographic Society of Canada Marie Tremaine Fellow
- 2022 Just Transformations Fellowship. The Center for Black Digital Research, Pennsylvania State University.
- 2022 Visiting Scholar in Residence. Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute.
GRANTS
- 2023 Queen’s University Faculty of Arts and Science Conference Fund, Grant
- 2023 SSHRC Institutional Grant, Queen's University
- 2021 SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Papers Worthy of Patronage,
- 2021 SSHRC Connection Grant [Co-Applicant], Black Studies Summer Seminar,
- 2020 Arts and Science Dean’s EDI Grant, Queen’s University
AWARDS & PRIZES
- 2023 Black Scholars Excellence in Mentoring Award, Queen’s University
- 2022 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize, American Studies Association
- 2022 Mayor’s Arts Awards: Arts Champion Award (Skeleton Park Arts Festival), City of Kingston
In the News
On ASALH-TV’s In Retrospect and Prospect S2, E3 “#DigBlk: Black History in the Digital Sphere” Dr. Moriah and Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, the co-directors of the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State, discuss their ongoing research collaboration and partnership.
