T.L. Cowan

T.L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Digital Media Cultures) in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Before moving to the University of Toronto, T.L. was a Presidential Visiting Professor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Chair of Experimental Pedagogies in the School of Media Studies at The New School. T.L.’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices.

Professor Cowan’s research focuses on the transnational study of queer, feminist, transgender and decolonizing network cultural practices across digital media and earlier emergent communication technologies. In particular, her work takes up cultural theories of collaboration, translocality and digitality through a study of grassroots cabaret and experimental media. She examines the ways that transgender, feminist and queer artists and activists continue to (re)invigorate their histories, politics, scenes and communities through the formation of online networks, ad hoc cultural and political collectives, one-off performance ensembles and protest performance based on the variety—or shared-stage—format. Her research moves across late 19th– and early 20th-Century European cabaret cultures to the Carpa Theater tradition in Mexico, to cabaret as ‘social disorganization’ in the Harlem Renaissance, to post-war transsexual cabaret cultures in Montreal, to contemporary shared-stage cultures and the street demonstrations known as ‘mass cabaret.’ She theorizes (and practice) cabaret as a collaborative technology, as a mode of inquiry and knowledge transfer, as a pedagogical tool and economic model that engenders and sustains counter-cultural media, aesthetics and politics, as well as a border-crossing world-making project like FemTechNet, which she argues is structured as a DIY techno-cabaret. Her research practice moves between page, stage and screen.