On January 10th, 2026, CDTS Professor Angelica Pesarini organized and chaired a panel titled “The Body as an Archive. Counter-stories of Resistance” for the Modern Language Association of America’s (MLA) annual convention. The MLA provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy.
This special MLA session stemmed from the cultivation of a generous and generative community that organically took shape over twelve weeks of teaching DTS2001, Professor Pesarini’s graduate course titled "Postcolonial Intimacies" which focused on topics of postcolonial intimacies, the body, and the archive. From the very first class, as Professor Pesarini wrote: "the shared act of storytelling, theoretical excavation, and attuning to bodies and feelings, fostered an alternative pedagogical space. This emergent community embodied bell hooks’ vision of the classroom as a “radical space of possibility” where the boundaries of "what is acceptable" can be transcended. In this precious space, intellectual engagement became inseparable from collective decolonial practices of care and healing, focusing on the concept of the body as an archive and the body in the archive.
On the panel were three DTS graduate students: Ameen Ahmed, Matthew Molinaro, and Lauren Warrington. Below is more about them, what they enjoyed about DTS2001, and how it applied to the MLA panel.
Ameen Ahmed is a third year PhD student at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at U of T. Ameen noted that “while the material in DTS2001 was (naturally) academic, we were being asked to engage with it not just analytically but emotionally as well. This opened up so many new directions for me in my own research.” Ameen added that this was beneficial for the MLA panel because “typically, analysis prepares us to produce critique (necessary, of course), but critique alone is both emotionally and politically insufficient, which DTS2001 recognized. This meant that towards the end of the semester I had a greater desire to produce work that was actively hopeful while at the same time recognizing critical issues — and the panel was the perfect opportunity to do that.”
Matthew Molinaro is a PhD student in the Department of English and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at U of T. Matthew enjoyed DTS2001 because it “brought together students from across the university, across disciplines to discuss and debate some of the most important developments in postcolonial theory, archival methods, embodiment, and diaspora and transnational studies. Professor Pesarini’s imaginative, kind, caring, and motivating pedagogy is unique at UofT. She led us to ask difficult, heartbreaking, and transformative questions of our world, the world that empire and colonialism made and still makes.” Matthew added that this course was an excellent starting point for the panel because “a huge question that remains from DTS2001 is how ordinary people carry on from the consolidation and recalibration of violence, how nonetheless visions of freedom shift, how these changes mark the body. At MLA, I traced how the “poet of the people” June Jordan turned to an apocalyptic register to account for the collapse of civil rights in the wake of the expansion of US imperialism.”
Since graduating, Lauren Warrington has continued independent research as an artist while also teaching as a sessional lecturer in Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at U of T. Lauren added that DTS2001 was so unique because of “the community Professor Pesarini facilitated” adding “I learned so much from the dialogue generated between classmates and felt lucky to be able to learn in a rigorous but also open space.” Lauren noted that for the MLA panel “I largely presented the research I did for my final project in DTS2001, so the class was immensely helpful in preparing for the panel. The course gave me the vocabulary to articulate so much about memory, embodiment, archives, absence, and affect, and relate it to my research, which happens to be about materiality, sculpture, and the Chinese Canadian diaspora.”
Congratulations to Professor Pesarini, Ameen Ahmed, Matthew Molinaro, and Lauren Warrington on an engaging and thought-provoking panel!