Hannah Dyer
2021 Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence
Faculty of Social Sciences

Dr. Hannah Dyer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child & Youth Studies at Brock University. She is a critical theorist of childhood with concentration in art/aesthetics, social conflict, queer theory, and psychoanalysis. She is interested in how aesthetic and expressive cultures of childhood reframe relationships to political crises, historical traumas, sexuality, racialization, and social debates about belonging. While taking the child’s material vulnerabilities and pressing need for care into account, this work also emphasizes fantasy and futurity. Her book, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development (2020, Rutgers University Press) extends these lines of analysis. Her research on childhood has also been published in numerous books and journals. Dr. Dyer teaches both undergraduate and graduate students, facilitating courses that are reinforced by her areas of research but also a deep commitment to making knowledge applicable and significant to student’s lives. Her courses are meant to provoke thought rather than resolution, and to remind both teacher and student of the social and political urgencies that drive our critique.  In both introductory and graduate courses, she seeks to enhance student’s aesthetic experiences of learning and feeling through art, popular culture, media, and literature. Her approach to pedagogy and curricular design is reinforced by the belief that teaching is an ethical and urgent task that can usher in new and more just worlds.