Marienza Miserere, MA
Meet the Contributor
Area(s) of Atlantic Study: Atlantic Provinces (Canada)
Academic Background
Marienza is a History PhD student at McMaster University, specializing in urban history, queer archival studies, and oral histories. Marienza holds a Master's degree in History and an Honours BA in History from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her dissertation explores queer community building across cities in Eastern Canada, including the Atlantic provinces. She is especially interested in how queer people historically used streets as sites of protest, celebration, and daily existence.
Research Interests
Beyond her doctoral project, Marienza is interested in research relating to:
Urban History
Queer History
Material Culture
Sex Work History
History of Emotions
Popular Culture
Outside of her academics, Marienza is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the open-access historical journal, Historically Modern, dedicated to publishing the research of emerging female and genderqueer scholars around the world.
Why Written in the Waves?
Marienza has never considered herself an environmental historian, and yet, her research has drawn her to coasts, beaches, and the ocean. Despite being an urban historian, she has inadvertently become a researcher of the waves because her cities of study all share the same bloodline: the Atlantic Ocean. Queerness has also long lived and breathed the water, whether lying on beaches, docking in ports, or swimming in the lakes and rivers. Marienza is fascinated by the way her social-urban histories intersect with water, and her research exemplifies the way queer people, the city, and water co-exist, quietly and loudly. Written in the Waves is the physical embodiment of this crossroad, where scholars of all backgrounds come together under the commonality of the Atlantic.
Contact Marienza: