Postdoctoral Fellow 2009-2010, Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM)

Lewis University

Dr. Tracey Nicholls is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Lewis University, and co-director of its Women’s Studies Program. She is on leave from Lewis to take up a postdoctoral fellowship with the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice Project, during which time she will be based at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) in Montréal. Her fellowship project brings together her interests in aesthetics and decolonization in an exploration of the ways that improvisatory musical practices can help to liberate and empower political communities deformed by imperialism. This is an extension of the work done in her doctoral dissertation, which explores connections between improvised music, human rights, and social justice, and considers how music-making can help build more responsive political communities (working title of forthcoming manuscript: Making Up Freedom: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future). It is also a companion project to the book she is co-editing, Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy (forthcoming from Lexington Books, 2010).