Fabien Maltais-Bayda

Fabien
Cohort Year: 2020
Research Interests: 20th/21st century literature, choreography, environmental humanities, queer theory, performance studies
Education: MA, University of Toronto, 2016; BA, McGill University, 2014

I am a joint PhD student in English Language and Literature and Theater and Performance Studies. Drawing on queer theory and ecocriticism, I work across text, film, and performance to consider how bodies are co-constituted with the space-times they inhabit. I'm interested in parsing how marginal bodies – both human and non-human – endure through precarious temporalities and shifting topographies. In particular, my current work attends to overlapping concerns around queer health and environmental degradation in 1990s California. This research focuses on temporal shifts between the chronic and the critical, examining how these dynamics register in a variety of cultural objects including road narratives, New Queer Cinema, HIV/AIDS zines, and durational body art.


I also maintain an interest in the material, sensory, and aesthetic frameworks through which performing bodies are encountered, writing on spectatorship, exhibitional approaches to choreography, and practices of intermedial adaptation in dance and visual art.