Laila Haidarali
Post-Doctoral Fellow in
African-American History
Laila Haidarali is delighted to join the Department of History as the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in African- American Studies. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Laila received her PhD in History at York University in Toronto—a city she has called home since immigrating to Canada twenty years ago. Her work explores the gendered meanings of complexion and its role in structuring ideals of African American womanhood between the Harlem Renaissance and the immediate pre civil rights era, circa 1920-1954. She is most concerned with the construction and dissemination of class-based ideals of feminized and sexualized beauty through literature, visual culture and consumerism. In addition to her scholarly work, Laila is a published poet whose expression also engages the complex tangle of raced, gendered and “othered” identities. |
