About

Philip Kaisary is the 2023–2025 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor of Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor at Carleton University, where he teaches legal, literary, and cultural studies. Before joining Carleton’s faculty in 2016, he held a Fulbright Fellowship at Vanderbilt University, taught at the University of Warwick, directed the Death Penalty Defense Project in Warwick Law School’s Centre for Human Rights in Practice, and practiced law in the United Kingdom. He was awarded tenure at Carleton in 2019.

He is the author of two books: The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014) and From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024). His other writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Atlantic Studies, Law & Humanities, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), PALARA (Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association), and Slavery & Abolition, as well as in peer-reviewed edited volumes including ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (SUNY Press, 2020), and Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations (University of Georgia Press, 2018). He is currently at work on his next book project, titled Worlding Law and Literature: A Materialist Critique and Reconstruction.

Philip holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh, a master’s degree from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick. As a recipient of a Lord Haldane Scholarship, awarded by Lincoln’s Inn, he earned a qualifying law degree and was admitted to the Law Society of England and Wales in 2012. While in graduate school, Philip interned in the office of the first Capital Defender for the Southeastern District of Virginia in the United States and received an Attorney General Award for Pro Bono activities. A former cross-country runner and triathlete, Philip enjoys cross-country skiing, racing in his local cyclocross series, cooking, and jazz. Born within the sound of the Bow Bells in London, he now lives in Ottawa, Ontario.