University of Toronto | Department of English
| Research Areas: Asian-Canadian Literature; Latinx Studies; Environmental Humanities; Environmental Literary Form; Postcolonial Studies |
Dr. Tania Aguila-Way is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her published work has examined the literary depictions of seed ecologies in Canada, Indigenous seed-saving movements in Mexico, and intersections between diasporic and scientific knowledge production in Asian Canadian literature. Her work examining the intersection of Canadian literary studies, postcolonial studies, and the environmental humanities has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature, University of Toronto Quarterly, The Goose, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Science and Canadian Literature. In “Racialized Ecologies in and Beyond Settler-Colonial Canada: Documentary, Speculative and Poetic Texts and Contexts,” Aguila-Way builds on her previous work, her current book manuscript Living and Making With: Embodiment, Emplacement, and Solidarity in BIPOC Literatures in Canada, and her own critical genealogy as a diasporic Latinx woman.
Selected Publications
Aguila-Way, Tania, et al. “Neoliberal Environments: Clearing the Smoke of 2020.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2021, pp. 5–24.
The special issue centers around selected publications that propose alternative social and environmental regeneration in the aftermath of the global pandemic and the unravelling of neoliberalism.
Aguila-Way, Tania. “Seed Activism, Global Environmental Justice, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in Annabel Soutar’s Seeds.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 43, no. 1, 2018, pp. 5–25.
Drawing on ecocritical discussions of the function of experimental aesthetics in environmental literature, Aguila-Way argues that the documentary play Seeds experiments with documentary tradition by combining the conventions of documentary theatre with an ecological form of avant-garde experimentalism to grapple with the complex scientific, social, and environmental questions raised by the Monsanto v. Schmeiser case.
Aguila-Way, Tania. “Uncertain Landscapes Risk, Trauma, and Scientific Knowledge in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter.” Canadian Literature, vol. 221, no. 221, 2014, pp. 18–35.
Aguila-Way explores Madeleine Thien’s engagement with scientific knowledge as a tool for negotiating risk and trauma in her novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter, arguing that Thien’s novels prompt us to consider how diasporic communities might productively engage with the sciences to construct the ecologies of knowledge that are necessary for grappling with the complex histories of trauma that continue to shape their experiences.