HYACINTH SIMPSON - PhD, Associate Professor, Department of English, Ryerson University

 

 

Dr. Hyacinth Simpson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto where she specializes in Caribbean, postcolonial, and diasporic literatures. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews on Caribbean fiction and poetry, as well as on films and plays produced within the region and its diasporas. From 2005-2014, she was Editor of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal MaComère, which won the Horizon Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2010. She is also creator, contributor, and editor of the digital humanities Caribbean poetry project Gardening in the Tropics, and is currently at work on a critical study of the Jamaican short story since Independence. Dr. Simpson’s work on Jamaican soldiers in the First World War began when she came across little known documents pertaining to the plight of Jamaican soldiers caught in a blizzard in Halifax in 1916 while on a research trip in Jamaica. In subsequent trips to various archival holdings in Jamaica, Canada, and the UK, she uncovered a fuller narrative of the journey of the Third Jamaica Contingent of the British West Indies Regiment from Kingston, to Halifax, and then to Bermuda and England. Dr. Simpson’s presentation for TO DO OUR SHARE: The African Canadian Experience in World War 1 focuses on the link between the hospitalization of over 100 men of the Third Jamaica Contingent between March 1916 and April 1917 and the initiation of the Canadian Military Hospital Commission’s rehabilitation program for returned invalided and wounded soldiers.

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