Colin Buist

PhD Candidate
colin.buist@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Modern/Contemporary
  • North American
  • Aesthetics
  • Photography
  • Queer theory

Areas of Interest

  • HIV/AIDS
  • Theories of gender and sexuality
  • Porn studies
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Continental philosophy

Working Dissertation

Title

The Dematerialization of AIDS

Supervisors

John Paul Ricco
Naisargi N. Davé
Dana Seitler

Description

My dissertation research in-progress looks to new media art that responds to living in the time of HIV/AIDS after the ‘crisis years’ (1981-1996), conceptualizing an ethics of what remains undetectable, incommunicable, and untransmittable concerning the ongoing effects of the virus on gay male sex, sexuality, and aesthetics.

Biography

Honours, Awards & Grants

  • Conference Grant. School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto, 2023.
  • Teaching Assistant Award for Excellence in Art History. Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga, 2022.

Education

MA, Art History, University of Toronto, 2021
BA, Art History, Theory and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2020

Presentations

“Ignorant Love,” Unlovable, The Centre for Comparative Literature’s 31st Annual Conference, Toronto, ON., Canada. 25 March 2023.
“Is the Stomach a Grave?,” Bersani and Art, American Comparative Literature Association, Chicago, IL. 17 March 2023.
“Doing Away and Letting Be” [paper on Leo Bersani and Michael Vahrenwald's photographic series, Universal Default, 2005-06], Exhaust(ion), University of Toronto Graduate English Association, Toronto, ON., Canada. 22 April 2022.
“Touching Queer Faith” [paper on Ross Bleckner's painting, Hands and Faces, 1993, and John Dugdale's cyanotype, Christ our Liberator, 1999], Touch me (not): Making Contact, Berkley/Stanford Symposium, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA. 8 May 2021.
“Toward an Inoperative Method of Queer Theory,” Arts of Inoperativity, American Comparative Literature Association, Montréal, QC., Canada. 9-11 April 2021.

Cohort

  • 2021-2022