Sheryl Hamilton

Sheryl Hamilton is a Canada Research Professor at Carleton University appointed to the Department of Law and Legal Studies and the School of Journalism and Communication. A member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists since 2014, Hamilton held a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Communication, Law and Governance between 2003 and 2013. She is the author or co-author of three books – Impersonations: Troubling the Person in Law and Culture (2009), Law’s Expression: Communication, Media and Law in Canada (2009) and Becoming Biosubjects: Bodies. Systems. Technologies. (2011). She is the co-editor of the 2017 collection, Sensing Law (Routledge) and is the Director of the Canadian Initiative in Law, Culture and Humanities.

She has published on a wide array of topics at the intersection of bodies, technology and regulation. For example, her last three articles focused on: great apes and legal personhood in the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes; the figure of the female mad scientist and scientific entrepreneurialism in the film Splice; and how it feels to play at apocalypse in the mobile game Pandemic. She is currently a member of a SSHRC-funded research team exploring sensori-legal studies and her research examines the shifting social norms, discourses and regulation of hands, touch and gesture in pandemic culture. Specifically she is exploring what it means to have dirty hands.

She is proud to have played a role in the early days of Studio XX with so many other fabulous women and is constantly thrilled by the amazing work the Studio continues to do!