Sajdeep Soomal has a PhD from the Department of History at the University of Toronto and will hold the Buchanan Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Canadian History in the Department of History at Queen’s University starting in October 2026. His research broadly examines how scientific ideas and practices have influenced colonial political economies. His work has appeared in Labour/Le Travail and Avery Review, with articles forthcoming in liquid blackness and Science, Technology & Human Values. Additional research is currently under review at History and Technology and Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste.
His dissertation project, "The Chemicalization of Substance," argues that chemistry transformed the tactics and techniques of 19th-century Canadian settler colonial governance. He introduces the concept of “chemical governmentality” to reveal that Canada’s staples economy increasingly relied on chemistry to commodify lumber, grain, oil and gas, and critical minerals by the turn of the twentieth century and to argue that chemical operations—from dissolution to catalysis—transited beyond the laboratory, generating new kinds of political thought and practice. For example, through archival research at Library and Archives Canada and the University of Toronto Archives, Soomal has demonstrated that the chemical principle of absorption was not only widely deployed for resource extraction and commodity formation but also taken up by government officials such as Sir John A. MacDonald and Duncan Campbell Scott to formulate the assimilatory policies of the Department of Indian Affairs. He argues the Department’s policy of “absorption” was shaped by the chemical theories advanced by the Canadian ethnologist Daniel Wilson, who envisioned “dissolving” and “absorbing” Indigenous peoples by encouraging intermarriage with settler colonists, whose collective blood was seen to be the ideal absorbent and solvent.
His postdoctoral research project, titled “Exodus on the Plains: Spencerian Libertarianism and the Politics of Starvation on the Canadian Plains, 1870–1900,” examines how the laissez-faire libertarian political philosophy of Herbert Spencer was adopted by Canadian liberal politicians in the late 19th century, such as M.P. David Mills, who pushed the politics of starvation on the Canadian Plains to its extreme. This project uses the tools of intellectual history to build upon the research efforts of Canadian historians such as Sarah Carter, Maureen Katherine Lux, and James Daschuk, who have already expounded the deadly effects of the federal government’s politics of starvation for Indigenous peoples. It explores how Spencer’s social Darwinist concept of “the survival of the fittest” was used verbatim by Mills in the House of Commons to repeatedly press the Macdonald government to eliminate all state intervention and food distribution by the Department of Indian Affairs, exacerbating the genocidal food policies that were directed toward the Indigenous people of the Canadian plains. Herbert Spencer drew on theories of biological evolution to inform political economy, arguing against state-led or charitable food distribution on the grounds that such assistance interfered with the “natural” evolutionary benefits produced through individual competition. Through further archival research with the David Mills fonds held at Western University during the course of this fellowship, this research will reveal how David Mills adopted Spencer's libertarian political philosophy and applied it in ways that exacerbated man-made famine in western Canada—crudely expressing his desire to foment a “survival of the fittest” situation on the plains akin to the biblical scenes of Exodus.
Sajdeep Soomal works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. He currently serves as a board member of InterAccess, Sanghum Film and Foundation Chamar. Soomal has previously conducted research and curatorial projects for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), The Reach Gallery Museum, Trinity Square Video (TSV), the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.
For further information, visit his personal website sajdeep.com.
