Cameron Jade MacDonald

Cameron Jade MacDonald is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation engages American literature from 1890-1955 as a means to reimagine the historical conjunction between the technological and scientific deployments of sound and sexuality near the turn of the 20th century, attuning to how other forms of sonic and queer expression come into fruition with and against the technologies, discourses, and logics prescribed by medicine, capital, and legislation when deployed through the literary and poetic. She argues that attuning to sonic events, tactics, and modalities in modern American literature, such as echoes, noise, silences, music, and other acoustic phenomena, intimates a vital shift in navigating queer selfhood and affect. By sounding out through the literary text, her project proposes that sonority and queerness retune the grammatical forms by which they are imagined to be bound to, and thus reanimate and gift each other their modes of attunement in their shared relation and resistance to the processes of linguistic signification.

List of Publications

Peer-Reviewed Publications:

• MacDonald, Cameron Jade. “‘A Story that Wasn’t in the Words’: Music, Mothering, and Minor Figures.” The Crossroads of Music and Literature: New Essays on the Muse of Song, edited by Kelly Baron and Andrew DuBois, Bloomsbury, 2025 (forthcoming)
• MacDonald, Cameron. “The Alien Resonances and Queer Obscurities of Hyperpop's 100 gecs.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2024, pp. 76-98.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “‘Befo’ de Wah’: Sounding Out Ill-Legibility in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories.” Sound Studies in African American Literature and Culture, special issue of Humanities, edited by Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, vol. 11, no. 6, 2022, pp. 1-11. doi: 10.3390/h11060137.
• Cecchetto, David and Cameron MacDonald. “Listening through a Pandemic: Silence, Noisemaking, and Music.” Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic, edited by Irene Gammel and Jason Wang, Routledge, 2022, pp. 39-48.

Selected Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications:

• MacDonald, Cameron. Review of Field Notes on Listening by Kit Dobson. University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 93, no. 3, 2024, pp. 414-15.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “A Literary (Re)Turn in Sound Studies.” Review of The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies, edited by Helen Groth and Julian Murphet. Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2024, pp. 333-36.
• MacDonald, Cameron. Review of Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840, written by Daniel Robert Laxer. University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 3, 2023, pp. 389-391.

Selected Academic Conferences:

• MacDonald, Cameron. “‘Louder and higher and lower and wider’: Channeling Queer Black Noise in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature Association, Boston, MA, 21-24 May 2025. Panel, The Harlem Renaissance 100 Years Later.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “Queer Futurity, Lunar Orientations, and Lessening Into One’s Voice.” SpokenWeb, Calgary, AB, 5-7 June 2024. Panel, Literary Soundscapes.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “‘If they exhaust noise and distance’: Homes, Stones, and the Queer Echoes of Tender Buttons.” Modernist Studies Association (MSA), Brooklyn, NY, 26-29 October 2023. Panel, Of Sea, Stone, and Street.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “Dogs, Echoes, and Other Queer Noises.” Modernist Studies Association (MSA), Brooklyn, NY, 26-29 October 2023. Seminar, Modernism and the Poetics of Noise.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “‘A Story that Wasn’t in the Words’: Music and Mothering in Ann Petry’s The Street.” Northeastern Modern Language Association (NeMLA), Niagara Falls, NY, 23-26 March 2023. Roundtable, African American Music and Literature.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “Songs Along the Keyboard: Listening Around Frank O’Hara.” Modern Language Association (MLA), Washington, DC, 6-9 January 2022. Roundtable, Poetry and Sound: Beyond Voice, sponsored by GS Poetry and Poetics.
• MacDonald, Cameron. “The Hum of Humor: Listening to Queer Laughter in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Modern Language Association (MLA), Toronto (online), 7-10 January 2021. Panel, Laughter & Feminist Critical Thought, sponsored by MS Screen Arts and Culture.

Selected Academic Awards:

• Ontario Graduate Domestic Scholarship - Doctoral, 2025-26
• SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral, 2022-25
• Viola Whitney Pratt Memorial OSOTF Scholarship, 2021-22
• Shane Baghai Scholarship in English Literature, University of Toronto, 2017-18