Matthew Molinaro

Matthew Molinaro (he/him) is a first-year PhD student in the Department of English and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on the literatures and histories of the African diaspora, Caribbean, and hemispheric Americas, and unfolds across aesthetics, critical theory, gender and sexuality, racial capitalism, and radical spatial practices.

In his undergraduate degree at McGill University, Matthew wrote honours theses concerning the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance’s anticolonial conceptions of sovereignty and the insurgent politics of migration, wellness, healthcare, and queer cultural life emerging in response to HIV/AIDS in Haiti and Canada. These projects developed closely with his organizing for Black studies and racial justice on campus and in Montreal and his spearheading of equity programming and anti-oppressive reporting in the student newsroom. At UofT, Matthew serves as Graduate Bureau Chief at The Varsity.

Matthew is currently in early stages of a dissertation on internationalism’s gender and sexual trouble throughout the Black Atlantic, and a research project on the relationship between literature and global carceral state-formation. With an extensive history of activism and journalism, he regularly brings his intellectual passions to public fora and community mobilization. For his commentary on how slavery, colonialism, and protest shape our present, Matthew has been interviewed by CBC, CTV, CJAD, CKUT, and The Maple. His reporting for The Local on the threats to trans rights in Toronto won a Journalists for Human Rights fellowship, and his master’s research on the choral poetics of Black feminist literature and intellectual history received a SSHRC grant and the Linda Munk Graduate Futures scholarship.

Matthew’s scholarship is animated by the freedom dreamers that have shaped him in Toronto, Montreal, Jamaica, Nigeria, Italy, Britain, and beyond. All power to them.