The Team

Who we are

Dr. Lissa Paul is a literary scholar specializing in children’s literature, particularly in children’s poetry, as well as in cultural studies and more recently, in eighteenth-century and Caribbean literary studies. She has authored or edited seven books, has chapters in another nineteen, and publishes widely in international journals. She also edited the Lion and the Unicorn for many years. Her research is generously funded by SSHRC  and her new book, Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist will be published by the University of Delaware Press in 2019. Her interest developed out of my SSHRC-funded research on Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840), who had been an abolitionist in 1790s London, a slave-holder and teacher in Barbados during Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816 and was in Niagara in 1833, as the act to abolish slavery in the British Empire was finally passed.

2010 Governor’s General Bronze Medal award recipient and winner of the 2020 Joshua Glover Memorial competition, Quentin VerCetty is a multidisciplinary storyteller, educator, activist, and an ever-growing interstellar tree. In 2021 he created the Joshua Glover statue, Toronto’s first and only statue of a person of African descent. It subsequently won the 2021 – 22 Fine Art Award from the Investment Casting Institute.  In 2021 he also became the first artist ever to be commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create art for the 2021-2022 season based on the theme of Afrofuturism. As one of the world’s leading Afrofuturist, he coined the terms “Sankofanology” and “Rastafuturism” and is the co-editor of Canada’s first contemporary art book on Afrofuturism, Cosmic Underground Northside: An Incantation of Black Canadian Speculative Discourse and Innerstandings (2020). In 2016 he created the Black Speculative Arts Movement Canada chapter and in 2022 he founded AstroSankofa Arts initiatives not-for-profit organization focused on public art production, art exhibitions, and NFTs development and support for Black creative work. With a passion for helping the next generation, he hopes to continue to honour his African ancestors, engage minds, inspire hearts, and help to make the world a better place.

Hyacinth Campbell is a doctoral candidate in the Social/Cultural/Political contexts field of Education at Brock University. Her research examines hip hop as critical pedagogy and interrogates its role as a tool and conduit of Black youth resistance and representation. Her research interest includes anti-Black racism, colorism, and marginalized students’ access to education. Her work is informed by critical theories of race, anti-racism, and Blackness. Hyacinth worked as a research assistant with Dr. Lissa Paul to create this website as a knowledge mobilization strategy to memorialize the African diasporic communities that had lived and died in Niagara in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Funding for the Project

Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the Insight Grant funding in support of Lissa Paul’s research on Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840). And thanks to Brock University for Exchange Grant funding in support of research towards memorializing the people of the African-diasporic communities of Niagara in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.