Massey College Fellowship to allow professor to complete major projects

Dr Hyacinth Simpson, a Jamaican-Canadian associate professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), has been named a 2025-2026 Massey College Visiting Scholar and is pleased that her work aligns with the prestigious honour.

Simpson is among three faculty members, who are on a full-year sabbatical leave (September to August leaves only), selected as Massey TMU Visiting Fellows at Massey College for the period September 1 to April 30.

TMU provides tenured faculty members the opportunity to participate in the Massey TMU Visiting Fellows Program at Massey College, a postgraduate residential college at the University of Toronto that provides a stimulating, interdisciplinary intellectual community.

Simpson said Massey focuses on the public good, whatever research the visiting scholars, senior fellows, junior fellows associated with the college do, must all be for the public good.

“For me, that resonates quite a lot because my work is about doing research that matters for black communities,” she said, noting that as an English scholar, she does poetry and literary criticism and they are ways of honouring, showcasing and engaging with the literary works of Caribbean, Caribbean-Canadian and black writers.

However, in the second stage of her career, she is more invested in stories that go beyond the literary. For her, the public good is about uncovering stories about Caribbean and black people in Canada, engaging with them, and having conversations about them with the community so that there is a deeper sense of rootedness.

It has been her motivation for the non-literary critic research that she has been doing over the past several years.

Simpson said that, in the first week of being at Massey College in September, she attended a high table lunch where she made many valuable connections.

“It’s a heightened version of what I experience every day as a professor because there the focus is on scholarship but also on sharing and networking.”

FOCUS

During her sabbatical, she will focus on two major research projects.

She will complete her book, The Halifax Incident, 1916–1917.

In March 1916, because of a series of “bad blunders”, the men of the Third Jamaica Contingent, who were en route to England to support the British cause in the First World War, were caught in a severe blizzard just outside the port of the Canadian city of Halifax. A significant number of them suffered from severe frostbite, and many had their toes, feet, or lower limbs amputated. There were even several fatalities.

Simpson recounts the details of that tragedy as well as the response by Canadian, Jamaican, and British authorities to it.

Acknowledging that she is not a historian, she said it is a different methodology and uncovering this story demanded travelling and spending time in archives and connecting with people.

“Over the years, I just continued with my literary criticism, my teaching and so on but it was always there bubbling up just below the surface. And every little piece of information I found, I banked it,” said Simpson who gave public lectures in Nova Scotia at the Royal Historical Society, held smaller talks in the UK and while doing archival research at the National Archives there, presented a public talk.

She said the research was painstaking and detailed because she did not want to be casual about things.

“A lot of things that I was looking for were photographs, photographic evidence. I think that’s really important when you are writing about a story in detail in ways that no one else has done before.”

Simpson also plans to mount a museum exhibition titled ‘Black Canadian Women on the Home Front: War Work of the Female Relatives of the Men of No. 2 Construction Battalion’.

Noting that both projects are connected, the professor said when she started the research, war history was not on her radar at all. She had to learn terminologies and find her way through it in the early years.

“The very first research trip that I made out to the Nova Scotia Archives, just exploratory, trying to find anything that I could around the Halifax Incident – I came across a folder. It was the draft of the book, The Nova Scotia Red Cross During the First World War. It was published in 1921 and the woman who wrote it was the president of the Nova Scotia Historical Society at the time.”

She came across a handwritten note in the draft about thanking the wives of the No. 2 battalion men for their work with the Nova Scotia Red Cross.

That piqued her interest and then she started learning about the black men who served for Canada in the No. 2 Construction Battalion at the same time that the Jamaicans were in Halifax.

It was an interesting connection because she was looking for information about whether or not the black community in Halifax supported the Jamaicans in 1916-1917 while they were recuperating there.

It dawned on her that black women were also actively engaged in Nova Scotia during the First World War; it wasn’t only white women.

In 2021-2022, she came across a treasure trove of information about the women who fundraised for the No. 2 Construction Battalion, information that has not been documented.

“I’m hoping that the exhibit will be the first stage of the larger kind of project that pulls together the stories of the female relatives of men of No. 2 and what those women contributed to the war effort on the home front,” said the St Jago High School alumna.

The book and exhibition should be complete by November 2026.

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