Helene Strauss is a Professor in the Department of English, which she chaired from 2012-2019. Her research and teaching interests span topics such as Southern African, African and African diasporic literature and audio-visual culture, feminist and queer aesthetic activisms, protest cultures, materialisms old and new, mining, documentary film, and embodied pedagogy. Her publications include the book Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press); co-edited special issues of the journals Studies in Social Justice (in progress), Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies; and a book titled Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access, co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola (Routledge).

            Her recent collaborations include participation in the ‘Affective Archives’ project (2017-2020), convened by Derek Hook (Duquesne U, Pittsburgh, US) and Margarita Palacios (Birkbeck, London), as well as a project on ‘Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding,’ with a group of academics, artists, and activists in Canada and South Africa. She has published numerous book chapters and articles in venues such as Subjectivity; a/b: Auto/Biography Studies; Social Dynamics; Journal of African Cinemas; Wasafiri; Safundi; and English Academy Review; is the Vice-Chair of the global Association for Cultural Studies; and serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Cultural Studies; Ariel: A Review of International English Literature; English in Africa; and Journal of Literary Studies. She has supervised and examined a combined total of 44 MA, PhD and Postdoctoral students (38 completed). She is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Canadian Governor General’s Gold Medal, a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Publication Grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program), and two consecutive ratings from the South African National Research Foundation.