The comparative study of Canadian and Australian literature has long demonstrated the value of reading these two settler-colonial traditions alongside one another. Building on the pioneering comparative work of Sneja Gunew, this seminar seeks to extend this dialogue by foregrounding queer identities, sexualities, and non-normative forms of belonging as central categories of comparative inquiry.

While Canada and Australia share histories of British colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, migration, and multicultural nation-building, they have also developed rich and diverse queer literary traditions that have rarely been examined comparatively. Bringing these traditions into dialogue offers new ways of understanding how sexuality intersects with race, Indigeneity, migration, diaspora, class, language, and nationhood across two interconnected settler-colonial contexts. By moving past the traditional "coming out" narrative—which often assumes a white, middle-class framework of individual liberation—contemporary Canadian and Australian BIPOC authors (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) rewrite queerness as fundamentally entangled with racialization, diaspora, and colonial trauma. 

The seminar seeks to place Canadian and Australian literary studies in conversation with developments in queer theory, queer of colour critique, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, and transcultural studies. Rather than treating queer literature as a discrete field, this seminar invites contributors to explore how queer identities reshape questions of citizenship, belonging, home, kinship, memory, mobility, multilingualism, translation, and decolonization. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Comparative studies of Canadian and Australian queer fiction, poetry, drama, life writing, and graphic narratives
• Queer of color critique and racialized queer identities
• Indigenous queer, Two-Spirit, and First Nations/Aboriginal LGBTQIA+ literatures
• Queer migration, diaspora and transnational mobility
• Queer multiculturalism and critiques of diversity discourse
• Transcultural, multilingual, and transnational queer identities
• Queer belonging, citizenship, and national identity
• Queer kinship, intimacy, and alternative family structures
• Religion, spirituality, and queer identities
• Queer readings of transculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and global mobility

By bringing together comparative literary studies with queer, postcolonial, and transcultural approaches across the Pacific, this seminar aims to rethink Canada and Australia as interconnected literary and cultural formations in which queer lives and narratives illuminate broader questions of colonialism, mobility, relationality, and belonging. Ultimately, the seminar seeks to demonstrate that comparative approaches to Canadian and Australian literature continue to generate new critical possibilities by placing the methodological legacy of Sneja Gunew into dialogue with contemporary queer, decolonial, and transcultural scholarship.