• PhD York University
• MA York University
• BA Honors, magna cum laude, York University
• BAS York University

Black Diaspora Studies, Black Cultural and Feminist Studies, Decolonization and Critical Studies, African American Literature and Canadian literature.

Sharon Morgan Beckford is associate professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and Equity, Diversity, Justice, and Inclusion (EDJI) Fellow (2023-24). Her research interests centre mainly on issues of identity and social justice, grounded primarily in the transnationalism of Black Diaspora Studies, Caribbean literature, Decolonization literatures, Black Cultural and Feminist Studies, African American literature and Canadian literature. She has published essays, book chapters, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries. Her internationally acclaimed book Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women’s Literature (2011) explores the roles of myth, history, and migration in the works of Caribbean Canadian women writers Dionne Brand, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Tessa McWatt, Claire Harris, and Makeda Silvera. Other publications focus on Black liberation, refusal, and marronnage in literature by Black writers living in the Black Diaspora.

Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women’s Literature. Toronto, ON: Inanna Publications and Education Inc. 2011.

“‘Finding My Way to Freedom’: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return Notes to Belonging.”  Special Issue: A Gathering: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging at 20 (pp. 1-352). TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 46, Mar 2023. 209-223. (UTP Journals)

“When to Die Is to Live: Acts of Refusal as Songs of Freedom in the African Diaspora.” Journal of International Humanities, vol 39, no. 2, 2022. 9-31.

"'The Black Tile in the Mosaic': Situating Austin Chesterfield Clarke in the Canadian Literary Tradition." American Review of Canadian Studies, vol. 49, no.1, 2019, pp. 50-69.

“Always a Domestic?: The Question of Canadian Redemption and Belonging in Selected Literature by Black Canadian Writers.” Southern Journal of Canadian Studies (SJCS), vol. 5, no.1, (December 2012), pp.122-47.

“‘We’re Here / Standing on the Shoreline’: On Sylvia Hamilton’s Films about Black Nova Scotians and Canadian Multiculturalism.” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, vol. 27, no. 2/3, 2010, pp. 114-20.

“‘A Geography of the Mind’: Black Canadian Women Writers as Cartographers of the Canadian Geographic Imagination.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 38, 2008, pp. 461-83.

“Anthologies and Anthologizing.” The Handbook to Black Canadian Literature. Routledge. Forthcoming.

“‘We’re Here / Standing on the Shoreline’: On Sylvia Hamilton’s Films about Black Nova Scotians and Canadian Multiculturalism.” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, vol. 27, no. 2/3, 2010, pp.114-20. Rpt. in Canadian Woman Studies: An Introductory Reader, edited by Brenda Cranney and Sheila Molloy, Inanna Publications, 2015, pp. 148-159.

“Taking a Piece of the Past with Us: Jamaican-Canadian Fruits of Migration in Makeda Silvera’s The Heart Does Not Bend.” Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence, edited by Carl E. James and Andrea Davis, Fernwood Publishing, 2012, pp. 84-96. Invited.

“Uprooting Claims to Legitimacy: Blackness and the Canadian National Imaginary in Djanet Sears’s Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God and Afua Cooper’s Negro Cemeteries.” Ebony Roots, Northern Soil, edited by Charmaine Nelson, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010, pp. 277-96.

“This Space Called Canada: Re-imagining the National Story.” Strangers in the Mirror: In and Out of the Mainstream of Culture in Canada, edited by Sanjay Talreja and Nurjehan Aziz, TSAR Publications, 2004, pp. 1 – 16. Rpt. in Sylvan Barnet et al. The Practical Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook, 2nd Canadian ed., Pearson Education Canada, 2007, pp. 25 -67.

“This Space Called Canada: Re-imagining the National Story.” Strangers in the Mirror: In and Out of the Mainstream of Culture in Canada, edited by Sanjay Talreja and Nurjehan Aziz. TSAR Publications, 2004, pp. 1-16.

Sharon is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the impact that selected Caribbean writers and intellectuals had on the work of African American author Richard Wright. She is creating digital humanities projects on the work of selected Black Diasporic writers.