Wednesday Talk: October 28, 2026, 10am-12pm – hybrid
October 28 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Karina Vernon, English, U of T
Title: “Cowboy Songs and the ‘Alternate Archives’ of the Black Atlantic”
Abstract: In this talk, I draw methodologically from musicology, agrarian studies, and ecological and genomic science to consider the repertoire of Black cowboy songs as “alternative archives” which offer more about Black life, and, indeed the Canadian prairies, than can be gleaned from traditional textual records. Black cowboys who arrived on the prairies from Texas in the nineteenth century brought with them a robust song culture, one that carries memory of a surprising history of human and other-than human relations in the exchanges that took place between the Canadian prairies, the southern United States, the Caribbean, and sixteenth-century Senegambia. Audiences will have a chance to hear historical recordings of Black cowboy songs as well as contemporary renditions.
Bio: Karina Vernon is an Associate Professor and Chair of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is the editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020). With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo), she co-edited Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (McGill-Queens 2026), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
The link to register is coming soon.
The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.
