Dr. Sydney Harker is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in History at St. Jerome’s University. She is a historian of gender, beauty, and the body in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada. Her research explores how understandings of the body were constructed and circulated in popular culture.
Her current postdoctoral research examines the lives of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in turn-of-the-century Canada. Drawing on newspaper accounts and archival records, her work explores how gender nonconformity was represented and policed, and what these encounters reveal about broader social expectations surrounding gender and the body.
Her doctoral research examined beauty culture in late Victorian Ontario, exploring how anxieties about moral and cultural decline encouraged efforts to regulate women’s bodies and positioned physical beauty as an organizing principle of white Canadian womanhood. This research now forms the basis of a book project under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association and the edited collection Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690–1830 (Penn State University Press, 2021).
