cesharpe


Christina Sharpe

Photo of Christina Sharpe

Department of Humanities

Professor

Phone: (416)736-2100 Ext: 33958
Email: cesharpe@yorku.ca


Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)—named by the Guardian (UK) and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and was a finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. Ordinary Notes was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2026) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist. In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In May 2024 she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities. In March 2025 she was named a Killam Prize Winner for the Humanities.

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Degrees

PhD, Cornell University
MA, Cornell University
BA, University of Pennsylvania

Appointments

Faculty of Graduate Studies

Research Interests

Visual Arts , Writing, Black Diaspora Literature and Theory, Black Diaspora Visual Cultures, Black Feminist Theory, Black Queer Studies