Shelby Shapiro

MA Candidate
shelby.shapiro@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Canadian Literature
  • Critical Race Studies
  • Disability Studies
  • Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Indigenous Literature
  • Literary and Critical Theory
  • Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature

Areas of Interest

  • Sad girl (auto)fiction
  • Sick girl (auto)fiction
  • Autofiction
  • Women’s Health
  • Intersectionality
  • Multidisciplinary
  • Trauma and Narrative

Biography

Shelby is following a path to uncover the strong connection between narrative as a healing agent and the strong history of women’s* literature that serves as a method to both convey and process gender-specific trauma. Particularly, how this links to the newly defined style of autofiction and the modern-day Sad/Sick Girl books that have found success in modern audiences. She asks if women have used the art of writing and publishing their own lightly fictionalized stories to both communicate and process trauma for so long, what might that mean and how could it be used to help others through their healing journeys?

List of Publications 

  • Gabriel Levine and Shelby Shapiro. (2021). Condo Towers and Buried Streams: Stories from The Housing Show. Liminalities. 17(1/2): 1-20.

Cohort

  • 2024-2025