Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- American Literature
- Critical Race Studies
- Digital Literature and New Media Studies
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Literary and Critical Theory
- Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature
Areas of Interest
- Performance Theory
- Film/Visual Studies
- Aesthetics/Ethics
- Art History
Biography
Victoria (Tia) Glista is a fourth-year PhD candidate and aspiring feminist theorist of American literature, cultural studies, and aesthetics. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation, "Posing Alternatives: Bodily Comportment and the Feminist Imagination", investigates the ethical and political life of bodily comportment—gesture, posture, pose—in U.S. feminist writing, film, and art of the 70s and 80s, including works by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Assata Shakur, Marilynne Robinson, Ana Mendieta, Martha Rosler, and Lorna Simpson. She is also invested in questions of visuality, or how feminist, queer, trans, and racialised writers and artists respond to dominant ways of seeing and modes of knowledge production.
Tia holds two MAs from U of T, in English and Cinema Studies respectively, as well as a self-directed BA focussing on feminist visual culture, criticism, and art history from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. Her scholarship has appeared in Camera Obscura, TBD*: Journal of Interdisciplinary Theory, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. Her criticism, essays, and interviews for public audiences appear regularly in The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, Document Journal, Public Books, Dazed, Interview, AnOther, and Electric Literature. She has interviewed leading authors, artists, and thinkers in the field including Eileen Myles, Angela Davis, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Preciado, Sophie Lewis, Olivia Laing, Miriam Toews, Lauren Elkin, and Sally Potter.
Tia served as President of the Graduate English Association in 2024-25, before which she was Vice-President. In 2025-26, she is chairing the Graduate Conference Committee.
List of Publications
- “Just Be There: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Surface in Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 39: 2 (2024)
- “Miriam Toews’ Women Talking and the Embodied Life of Feminist Nonviolence,” Contemporary Women’s Writing, 17:1 (2023)
- Book Review: Ugly Freedoms by Elizabeth R. Anker, TBD*: Journal of Interdisciplinary Theory, vol. 7 (2022)
Cohort
- 2022-2023