About me
I am a PhD Candidate and Humanities Studentship recipient in the School of Humanities. I graduated with a BA (Hons) in American and Canadian Studies from the University of Birmingham in 2021 before completing an MA as a recipient of the Christine and Ian Bolt Scholarship at the University of Kent in 2022.
My research interests primarily lie in Queer (and) Indigenous Studies, though I am engaged with American Studies broadly and have a keen interest in New York poetry, Disability Studies, and Neurodiversity Narratives and Studies.
I am editorial assistant at the open-access journal Transmotion, work on the editorial team for the special issue of the European Journal of American Culture (EJAC) titled 'American Dream / American Nightmare', and co-facilitate the community driven dé’men minkanen initiative to honour and share the history of the Potawatomi Trail of Death in Central Illinois. I was the Director of the New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Network (NVPoco) until August 2025.
Outside of academia, I am a published and active poet writing and performing nationally and internationally, typically, under the pen name "Soph Kay," or previously as "Sophie Kay".
You can find my poetry online in the e-mag Sonder Series (2023), and in print in the anthologies Depression is What Really Killed the Dinosaurs (2022), Poetry Diary(2022), An Island Under Water (2024), and Capitalism is a Death Cult (2025).
Research
My PhD thesis, focuses on a selection of collected works by Indigiqueer writer-scholars Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree) and Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree). The project investigates how Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit identities, experiences, and relations are written into being, with a particular interest in how Belcourt and Whitehead underline the decolonial potential of Indigiqueerness.
Publications
For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.