Joan Simalchik

Dr. Joan Simalchik was director of the interdisciplinary Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies Program at UTM and taught courses on women, social change and experiential learning, history, memory and human rights, and transnational perspectives on gender and cultural difference. She was the editor and contributor to the Canadian edition of Women’s Realities/Women’s Choices, (Oxford University Press 2017), a textbook for introductory courses in Women and Gender Studies.

Her work as founding executive director of the Canadian Centre for Victims of informs her research on the impact (particularly the gender impact) of psychosocial trauma on communities, families and individuals. She is a member of the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Museums and Public History Quadrant that is partnered with the University of Western Cape. Her ongoing collaboration with Chile's Museum of Memory and Human Rights includes an archival project and the production of video interviews with members of the Canadian human rights solidarity movement circa 1973 to the present. Professor Simalchik’s current research project is with the Public Health, Mental Health and Mass Atrocity Prevention of Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights and the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. She is published in June 2021 Harvard’s Health and Human Rights Journal: Disrupting Legacies of Trauma: Interdisciplinary Interventions for Health and Human Rights.

Feminist praxis forms a significant element of Professor Simalchik’s scholarly activity. In June 2019, she co-organized the Global Conference on Human Trafficking and Trauma at UTM with the Peel Institute on Violence Prevention and Harvard’s School of Public Health HEAL Network and she is a member of the organizing committee for the forthcoming UTM International Conference on Sustainability: Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice, and Action.

She is the recipient the CCVT Amina Malko Award for Service to Refugee Women (2007), the University of Toronto’s Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize (2012) and Chile’s Presidential Award in recognition of her humanitarian service to the people of Chile (2017). She received the Student Support Award from U of T’s Students’ Administrative Council Equity Commission and the Student Development Teaching Award from the Erindale Part-time Students Union and the Dean’s Merit Award for her contribution to teaching and service (2007-2012; 2016-2020).