Cheryl Thompson
Associate Professor
Department: School of Performance
Office: RCC-232G, Rogers Communication Centre
Phone: 416-979-5000 x544329
Email: cheryl.thompson@torontomu.ca
Education: Honours BA (Criminology), MA (Communication & Culture), PhD (McGill University, Communication Studies)
Discipline: Communication & Cultural Studies
Areas of Expertise:
Advertising & Consumer Culture
African American History & Culture
Archives & Archiving Practices
Black Beauty Culture &Fashion
Black Canadian History & Culture
Black Dance & Music Culture
Black Feminist Media Studies
Celebrity & Promotional Culture
Critical Digital Technologies
Theatre & Performance Studies
Visual Culture & Photography
In 2023, Dr. Cheryl was promoted to Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). She joined the School as an Assistant Professor in 2022. She was previously a faculty member in Creative Industries (2018-2021). She is the author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021) and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada's Black Beauty Culture (2019), (external link) (external link) external link (external link) (external link) . Dr. Thompson is currently director of Black Creative Lab, which extends the pedagogy of THF470: Black Creative Practices, an open elective course that unpacks Black creative origins, forms, and styles. Black Creative Lab's projects include MobaProjects, a digital mapping of Black archival collections in Ontario, and BREC, a collection and database that catalogues Blackface as performance and the Black community's resistance to it across time and space.
In 2021, Dr. Thompson was a recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2021-26) titled, "Mapping Ontario's Black Archives Through Storytelling," this project aims to catalogue Ontario's Black archival collections, and through ethnographic interviews with the province's creative community, collect stories about the collections that will culminate with a public exhibition curated by Dr. Thompson and her research team.
In addition to publishing in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, Dr. Thompson has also appeared on numerous podcasts and media platforms in Canada and internationally. Dr. Thompson holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. She previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto's Centre for Theatre, Drama & Performance Studies, and the University of Toronto Mississauga's Department of English & Drama. In 2021, Dr. Thompson was named to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
Related Content
- Thompson, Cheryl & Campbell, Miranda (Eds.). Creative Industries in Canada. Vancouver: Canadian Scholars Press (2022).
- Thompson, Cheryl (Guest Ed.), Special Issue on “Black Canadian Creativity, Expressive Cultures, and Narratives of Space and Place.” The Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire 56 3 (Winter 2021): 213-380.
- Thompson, Cheryl. “Black Canadians in the Journal of Canadian Communication: Is there a Problem with Speaking for Others?” Canadian Journal of Communication Special Issue, On the Margins of the Margins: Racism and Colonialism in Canadian Communication Studies (47) 3 (2022): 440-461.
- Thompson, Cheryl. "Casting Blackface in Canada: Unmasking the History of 'White and Black' Minstrel Shows." Canadian Theatre Review (In-press)
- Thompson, Cheryl. ”Black Creativity, Expressive Cultures, and Narratives of Space and Place.” Special Issue on “Black Canadian Creativity, Expressive Cultures, and Narratives of Space and Place,” The Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire 56 3 (Winter 2021): 213-215.
- Thompson, Cheryl. “Black Minstrelsy on Canadian Stages: Nostalgia for Plantation Slavery in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, (31) 1 (2021): 67-94. https://doi.org/10.7202/1083628ar (external link) . **Winner, The CHA Journal Prize for the best article from #1 and #2 issues, 2021 (external link) **
- Thompson, Cheryl. “The Show Did Go On: How Theatre Changed After the Last Pandemic.” Canadian Theatre Review, 127 (Summer 2021): 91-93. https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.187.027 (external link) .
- “Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives Through Storytelling”
Ontario Government Early Researcher Award, (2021-2026), $190,000
Project Director - “White Skin, Black Masks: Canada's Blackface Secret”
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant (2020-2022), $47,625
Co-applicant, Pink Moon Studio - “Newspapers, Minstrelsy and Black Performance at the Theatre: Mapping the Spaces of Nation-Building in Toronto, 1870s to 1930s”
SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019-2022), $48,072
Principal Investigator - “Newspapers, Theatres, and the Spaces of Black Performance in Toronto”
The Creative School SRC Seed Grant (2018-2019), $6880
Principal Investigator - "Creating Public Access to Black Archives and the Performing Arts" Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Cananda (SSHRC) Connection Grant (2022-2023), $42.336
For the latest updates, please visit the faculty page linked below.