The WGSI is delighted to announce that incoming WGSI Collaborative student Taylor Chalker has been awarded the Kay Armatage Graduate Women and Gender Studies Entrance Prize for the 2025-2026 academic year.
This award is to support an exceptional graduate student entering the Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender studies and is named in honour of Professor Kay Armatage.
Taylor Chalker is an incoming PhD student studying the History of Empire, Colonialism, and Indigeneity with the Department of History and working towards a collaborative specialization with the Women and Gender Studies Institute.
Originally from Newfoundland, Taylor attended the University of New Brunswick for the last six years, obtaining an undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Arts with a joint honours in English and History and a Master’s degree from the Department of Historical Studies.
Her doctoral, A History Obscured: Indigenous Enslavement and Human Trafficking in the Vast Early Americas, explores the trans-hemispheric enslavement and human trafficking of Indigenous people from North America to the English Caribbean. It will foreground the lived experiences of Indigenous women and children, who accounted for many of the Indigenous people enslaved and trafficked by the English.
Taylor is committed to challenging and diversifying the hegemonic histories of slavery that omit the various Indigenous groups that were enslaved and trafficked in Early America. This project will challenge the forced silencing of Indigenous histories, question why Indigenous slavery was concealed for so long, and seek to understand what daily life looked like for Indigenous slaves.
The silencing of Indigenous voices today bears traces of its early modern legacy and, thus, opens a space for further thinking about how history continues to haunt the present. As a Métis woman, Taylor is keenly aware that this history is key to undoing its present-day legacies. Her research will read past the words of those that were privileged enough to write them, and search for insight into the voices that have long been ignored.