New Faculty in Arts: Dr. Aarzoo Singh
Fri. Mar. 1, 2024
Congratulations to our new faculty members in the Faculty of Arts! We look forward to introducing each of them to you in the coming weeks.
Here we feature Dr. Arzoo Singh, Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
Dr. Aarzoo Singh received the “Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Junior Fellowship” from 2014-2020 for her research.
Dr. Tracy Whalen, Acting Dean of Arts, enthuses, “Dr. Aarzoo Singh is an exciting addition to the department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She is intellectually curious and open to the twists and turns of the research process, which makes for a great teacher and colleague.”
Welcome Dr. Singh and thank you for sharing about yourself with us!
Dr. Aarzoo Singh (Bio)
Dr. Aarzoo Singh is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on the theoretical and experiential connections between storytelling, objects, locations, and displacement for the South Asian Diaspora. Her research was rewarded the Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Junior Fellowship from 2014-2020 and she was a nominee for the Christopher Knapper Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2013. Her current research and teaching interests focus on reparative justice narratives, alternative epistemologies, affective and personal archives, and postcolonial subjectivity. She was interviewed on her research for the British Museum of Colonisation’s platform Paper Trails and her published work can be found in DisClosure: A Journal of Social Theory and in the forthcoming anthology Monsters and Monstrosity in Media (Vernon Press).
We've invited our new faculty members to answer some questions of their choice. Here is what Dr. Singh had to say!
Arts: What course are you most looking forward to teaching at UWinnipeg – and why?
As new faculty at the dept. of Women's and Gender Studies I have been most looking forward to teaching a few courses. I always love teaching Media and Gender courses, so teaching Girls, Women, and Popular Culture has been really great. I love implementing creative elements to the assignments and seeing what amazing creations our students come up with, becoming producers of culture themselves and exploring various epistemological sites. But also as my research is invested in postcolonial feminisms and studies, I am also keen to teach Gender, Race, and Nation (which I will be teaching next year). I think having conversations with students around decolonization and postcolonial subjectivity in the context of Winnipeg will be really interesting.
Arts: What was one thing you learned as an undergraduate that was/has been really important to you – and why?
I think one of the toughest things to grapple with as an undergrad is the weight of expectations of getting everything right the first time. I remember the thought of changing my major, or taking an extra year, or changing my mind was so difficult to contemplate because everything felt quite heavy and permanent. But something I wish I could tell myself was that this was a time to make mistakes and to try new things, to be open to changing and evolving—that is where real growth and learning happens. That getting it wrong is part of the process too. This is something I still remind myself of as an academic too. Changing your mind when you have more or better information is important even in research practices—allowing the research process to guide you rather than arriving at a prescribed destination that you are trying to make your research fit into.