I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where I research and teach in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. I am the editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is in revisions. With my long-time collaborator, Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo), I co-edited Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (McGill-Queens, 2026), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation.
My current research draws from musicology, agrarian studies, and ecological and genomic science to theorize the musical ecology of the prairies created by Black voyageurs, cowboys, singers, and musicians. I read seeds and songs as “alternative archives” that preserve the histories of cultural and genetic exchange between the Canadian prairies, the southern United States, the Caribbean, and sixteenth-century Senegambia.
Profiles of Research
“Karina Vernon’s work on Black Prairie histories earns Royal Society of Canada honour.” UTSC NEWS. September 4, 2025.
“English professor’s work looks at expressions of the Black experience in the Canadian Prairies” by Chris Garbutt. UTSC Commons Magazine. February 15, 2019. pp.6-7.
“A Lost Literature: Prof. Karina Vernon shares the untold stories of Black people on the Canadian Prairies” by Vicki Mochama. University of Toronto Magazine. June 5, 2019.
Research Interests
Contemporary Canadian Literature; Black Canadian Cultural Studies; Canadian Regionalism, especially prairie literature and criticism; Diaspora Theory; Archives
Karina Vernon 