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Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

DPHIL SCHOLAR | MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY / TORCH | 2017–2020

Ruth Ramsden-Karelse is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently completing her first monograph, titled Gays and Girls Make Worlds, about how in gay, queer, and trans people of colour living in apartheid South Africa worked together to create new realities that were more just and more expansive. In particular, Ruth’s research centres on the GALA Queer Archive’s Kewpie Photographic Collection and associated depictions of Cape Town’s famous District Six.

From 2022-2024, Ruth was a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and, before that, a Research Associate at the University of Manchester’s Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity. In 2022, she received her DPhil in English from the University of Oxford, where she was the inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Scholar.

Since then, Ruth has become an Associate of the Stuart Hall Foundation. She is a member of the Academic Committee and hosts the scholars, fellows, and artists’ monthly forums, working closely with the Foundation team to develop these regular meetings as a supportive and enriching space for network members.

Ruth is also an organising member of the queer South African collective Salon Kewpie. Her writing has appeared in publications including GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Gender, Place & Culture and has been awarded a prize by the Queer African Studies Association.