Karina Vernon researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. She is the co-editor, with Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) of Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (McGill-Queens, forthcoming), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation. Her fellowship research project is titled Black Noise: Wayward Listening in the Black Prairies’ Sonic Archives. Karina is one of our 2024-25 JHI Faculty Research Fellows.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
My research focuses broadly on Black Canadian literature and that of the Canadian prairies in particular. I’m passionate about archival research and the possibilities involved in finding buried texts or other materials that enables me to tell new stories about Black life. It excites me to forge connections across time with people who perhaps never imagined that their lives were important but whose creative strategies for navigating the world are inspiring and meaningful in the present.
What project(s) are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it (them)?
I’m researching Black cowboys! I’m interested in their songs. In the late nineteenth-century, after Emancipation in the United States, a significant number of cowboys—up to 1/3—were Black. Cowboys originally sang to their cattle in the days before the prairies was fenced. Cowboys sang to calm their herds so they wouldn’t stampede (and become lost) during thunderstorms or when they were startled by wolves and coyote. I’m thinking about the cowboys’ repertoire of songs as a significant archive of Black oral culture, one that goes back to the cattle herding culture of East Africa. This research pushes back on the cultural whitewashing of the cowboy figure and demands new methods for dealing with unruly and ephemeral oral materials.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
It’s been a tremendous gift! There is nothing more luxurious in a researcher’s life than time and a community in which to think. It is exhilarating to be a part of a supportive multi-generational community in which we encourage one another to approach our research problems sideways through the vocabularies and frameworks offered by other disciplines. This can—and has—led to great leaps forward in my thinking.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
Although they are often pitted against one other (especially when competing for limited resources), I don’t necessarily see the humanities and sciences as opposed or antagonistic disciplines. All of our fields of knowledge are necessary and important. In my current research, I work with a variety of disciplines including genomic science and agrarian studies. The story of Black cowboys is also a story about cattle, horses, buffalo, and grass. The humanities and sciences have different and often complementary tools by which to tell stories.
My humanities discipline is literary studies. One of the texts I like to teach, especially to first-year students, is called “The Truth About Stories” by Cherokee author Thomas King. In it, he writes that it’s our stories that teach us what it means to be human, and a good human at that. “The truth about stories,” King writes, “is that that’s all we are.” Once we recognize that our societies are based upon the stories we tell (and don’t tell), we can work to change the story. We desperately need different stories now that teach us how to value other-than-human life as much as we value our own.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I’m inspired by the work my students are doing at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I’m struck by the inventiveness and courage they bring to their research questions and the ways they’re challenging the forms and conventions of academic writing.
What is a fun fact about you?
I’m a “fraghead” – a perfume enthusiast! I enjoy the way scents can trigger powerful memories. I think we’ve all had that experience of smelling something and then being catapulted back in time. Olfaction is the only sense that gets processed in the brain. That’s why smell is the most strongly linked to emotion and memory. I enjoy the way perfume can conjure stories with an immediacy that is unmatched by other arts. My hobby is writing perfume reviews, and I revel in the metaphorical language that writing about perfume entails.