Dr. Amber Dean's research focuses on public mourning, violence, and cultural memory, engaging with the fields of trauma and memory studies, cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and critical settler colonial studies. She also investigates how creative forms of cultural production (fiction, art, photography, film, performance) disrupt and reframe common-sense understandings of whose lives (and deaths) matter.
Her current research project turns to case studies of public mourning to consider what such mourning (or its absence) in the aftermath of mass violent death might convey about whose lives matter most. This project also explores how creative forms of resistance, including writing, art, and activism, often disrupt a wider public tendency to disavow or forget some events of mass death or to frame them as not mattering.
Dr. Dean's recent work in the public humanities involves working in (and sometimes building) archives of difficult histories and communicating about the importance of these archives in order to increase their accessibility and use. For example, she contributes to the development of the Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archives and leads related creative projects on Hamilton’s queer histories. She is also leading streams on “Archival Resistance” and “Art as a Practice of Belonging and Commemoration” for a SSHRC-National Truth and Reconciliation Centre-funded research project led by Dr. Vanessa Watts in partnership with key Haudenosaunee and Inuit organizations to gain access to archives of the Mohawk Institute residential school and the Hamilton Mountain TB Sanatorium, and to develop creative commemorative projects from these archives. Dr. Dean also collaborates with Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty on a number of projects that will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1985 Air India bombing, the commemoration of which they have also addressed together in an edited book that combines scholarly essays with visual art, poetry, and fiction to appeal to wider public audiences.
These projects build on Dr. Dean's previous research. Her first book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (University of Toronto Press, 2015), offered a timely critical analysis of representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouver’s disappeared women to the attention of a wider public. Awarded the Canadian Studies Network (CSN-RÉC)'s 2016 prize for the Best Book in Canadian Studies, the Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Feministes Association’s 2017 Outstanding Scholarship Prize (co-winner), and the 2017 Donald Shepherd Book Prize by the McMaster Faculty of Humanities, the book explores the potential that varied approaches to public mourning and memorialization hold for provoking a much wider sense of implication in the disappearances or murders of the women in question, and in doing so it provides provocations for reconsidering how and why their violent deaths were possible in the first place.
Her next research project focused on developing the connections between public mourning and the (re)production of an idealized “Canadian-ness” that privileges whiteness and conventional expressions of gender and sexuality. By analyzing examples of public mourning and memorialization occurring in the wake of the 2005 Mayerthorpe RCMP murders, the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, and the disappearance or murder of 1200 or more Indigenous women across Canada, Dr. Dean examined how some violent deaths are quite clearly represented in a national framework as mattering more than others, and explored how this challenges popular understandings of Canada as a multicultural mosaic premised on equality. This research resulted in several book chapters and journal articles, and led to a co-edited book with Chandrima Chakraborty and Angela Failler, Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning (University of Alberta Press, 2017).
Also committed to community-engaged and experiential teaching and learning, Dr. Dean has written about her praxis in previous articles and in a recent book chapter, “Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and University-Community Engagement: What sorts of encounters with difference are our institutions prioritizing?” With Susanne Luhmann and Jennifer L. Johnson, she has also co-edited a collection of essays on this topic titled Feminist Praxis Revisited: Critical Reflections on University- Community Engagement (Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2019). In 2024, Dr. Dean became Director of the McMaster Faculty of Humanities' Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts.
Dr. Dean teaches undergraduate courses in queer studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and decolonization and resistance. She offers a graduate seminar on public mourning in Canada. Most of her courses include experiential learning, public-facing writing, or community-engaged projects. Students in many different courses also contribute to her website/blog on LGBTQ2S+ histories of violence. In 2026, Dr. Dean will also start teaching in the Walls To Bridges prison education program.
Dr. Dean's areas of graduate supervision include projects in trauma and memory studies, feminist and queer theory, and critical settler colonial studies. She welcomes graduate students working in the areas of public mourning, violence, memorialization, and cultural memory; feminist and queer theory, especially projects focused on gender-based/sexualized violence, sex work, or the question of how we pass on feminist and queer histories; and projects on building solidarities across difference, especially in relation to feminist/queer activism or social justice movements. She also serves on MA and PhD committees in areas ranging from postcolonial studies to Indigenous literary studies to critical race and sexuality studies.
