Cassandra Hartblay, Ph.D., is a sociocultural medical anthropologist working in a variety of media and performance formats.
Dr. Hartblay is associate professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough based in the Department of Health and Society, where she has worked since 2018. She is a member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and affiliate faculty at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies and the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies. In 2020, she co-founded and from 2020-2025 served as the inaugural director of a new research unit, The Centre for Global Disability Studies. Dr. Hartblay received tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2024.
Dr. Hartblay’s academic research considers global variations of ableism as a system of oppression entwined with other geopolitical forces and impacting diffuse social dynamics. Her published work traces these dynamics as well as the lived experiences of adults with disabilities in Russia and North American, the concept of accessible design in complex global societies. Her recent fieldwork explores the social life of the Russian patronymic name as a locus of political contestation in Central Asia.
Dr. Hartblay held several roles before coming to the University of Toronto.
During the 2017-2018 academic year, Dr. Hartblay was a postdoctoral associate and lecturer for Russian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, with a cross-affiliation with the Department of Anthropology.
She was a 2015-2017 postdoctoral associate in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego, a position supported by the University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLED). While at UCSD, she taught undergraduate courses in the Department of Anthropology, Department of Communication, and the Program in Critical Gender Studies during the 2016-2017 academic year. In 2015, she was a summer research scholar at the Keenan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC.
Dr. Hartblay received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2015.
Dr. Hartblay has served on the steering committee of the Disability Research Interest Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and the Executive Board of the Society for Disability Studies.
Dr. Hartblay has received numerous accolades.
She was awarded the 2023 University of Toronto Scarborough Pre-Tenure Faculty Research Award for outstanding research activities in the Social Sciences division. She received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies in 2013 for work on comparative Soviet and American regimes of productivity and dependency.
Dr. Hartblay has received numerous grants and fellowships. These include a SSHRC Insight Grant (2024-2029), the Martha L McCain Faculty Fellowship at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (2023-2024) for the “Contesting Otchestvo” project; and a Connaught New Researcher Award (2020-2023) and Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Undergraduate Fellowship for a trainee (2022) that contributed to the #CripRitual exhibition.
Dr. Hartblay was awarded a 2016-2017 Frontiers of Innovation Scholarship Program grant for research and development of an original play titled I WAS NEVER ALONE, based on ethnographic fieldwork on the life experiences of people with mobility and speech impairments in Russia. The grant supported a staged workshop at UC San Diego/La Jolla Playhouse in early October 2016 with visiting director Joseph Megel and assistant director Jason Dowart. The play has also been performed in staged readings at UNC Chapel Hill and Yale University.
Her writing for a general audience has been featured in The Story Collider podcast, Anthropology News, on the medical anthropology blog Somatosphere, and elsewhere.
Contact:
Email Dr. Hartblay at
cassandra.hartblay (at) utoronto (dot) ca