Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- North American
- Modern/Contemporary
- Indigenous
- Book History
Areas of Interest
- Research-creation methodologies
- Haudenosaunee epistemologies and history
- Indigenous clothing and self-fashioning
- Indigenous collections
- Book history, textual theory
- Indigenous methodologies, "research as ceremony"
- Craft, i.e., beading, wampum
- Performance art
- Costumes and performance dress
- E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake
Working Dissertation
Title
Supervisors
Description
Common approaches to late-nineteenth-century Onkwehonwe-Canadian poetess and performer E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake read her through lenses of identity: class, sex and gender, sexuality, nationality, and race. Various interpretations of her identity are used to support ideological struggles pertinent to each scholar’s body of work, while only superficially analysing objects and events that constitute Pauline’s creative work. Consequently, the same brief statements, especially about her costumed performance, are repeated throughout the literature, distilling her artistry into talking points that cannot be regarded as correct. Despite ample scholarly attention over the last 100 years, Pauline, the Artist, still demands attentive consideration. First, I comment on problems in the literature pertaining to ‘reading’ her identity, later discuss creative engagements other artists and some scholars have undertaken with Pauline’s work, and then introduce my own research-creation methods. My creative methodologies are based in art, design, and craft to deeply read Pauline’s costume, performance and writing. I recreate pieces of her costume, publish an artist’s book version of her first book The White Wampum (1895), and perform inspired travel. I utilize theoretical groundwork from the discipline of book history and print culture, such as paratextual theories, an expansive definition of ‘text’, and semiotics. Additionally, I rely on Onkwehonwe epistemologies and research paradigms as alternatives to broaden my practice of knowledge creation and transmission while moving beyond typical European- and Euro-American-based academic values and practices. Rather than instrumentalize Pauline’s identity to replicate a prescribed outcome, I use research-creation methodologies to develop innovative readings of her artistry.
Biography
Nyssa Komorowski (member of Oneida Nation of the Thames) is a SSHRC-funded PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto in Art History and Book History and Print Culture. Her doctoral dissertation research investigates the creative work of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake, with a focus on Haudenosaunee epistemologies, research-creation methodologies, and interdisciplinary approaches between book history and art history. Her SSHRC-funded MA research focussed on how images of the stereotypical ‘Indian’ were used by settler-colonials in the nineteenth century, and on Indigenous land relations, ancestral relationships with the earth, and animacy of the land. She is also a visual artist who makes illustrations and exhibits murals and installations of special projects. Her BFA was completed at OCAD University in cross-disciplinary art with a specialization in publications, and she won the program medal upon graduation. She completed a certificate program specializing in dark room photography processes at Haliburton School of the Arts and earned an advanced degree in art at Fanshawe College, graduating both programs with honours.
Selected Publications
- Article: “The Seashells that Saved the World.“ C Mag. August 2024.
- Book chapter: “Haudenosaunee Creation as Ecocritical Method in Shelley Niro’s La Pieta Series” in Ecocritical Methods in Art History. Manchester University Press. Forthcoming.
- Conference review: “New Directions in Indigenous Book History.” Early American Literature. 2024.
- Peer-reviewed book chapter: “Plurality, Collaboration, and Synthesis in the Publication of Haudenosaunee History” in Storytelling, Identity Formation, and Resistance in North American Indigenous Culture. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Forthcoming.
- Student journal: “A Flaysome Web: Weaving the Female Gothic into a Feminist Theory of the Virtual Text,” in Panic at the Discourse 3 no. 1, “Science Fiction from the Margins.” Forthcoming.
Honours, Awards and Grants
- 2022-25 — Canada Graduate Scholarship Doctoral, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- 2020-21 — Canada Graduate Scholarship – Masters, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- 2015 — Program Medal, Cross-Disciplinary Art: Publications, OCAD University
Professional Affiliations
- American Society for Environmental History (ASEH)
- Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)
- Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
- Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP)
Education
Presentations
Administrative Service
Cohort
- 2021-2022