Zariyah Grant

Zariyah Grant is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto and the Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on twentieth-century United States history, with interests in Black urban life, gender and racial capitalism, and the history of slavery and its afterlives.

Her dissertation, completed under the supervision of professors Chris Johnson and Melanie Newton,  examines how Black New Yorkers in the decades after World War II navigated everyday questions of order, safety, and survival in neighborhoods shaped by uneven and often punitive state presence. Rather than centering formal political movements, the project traces how ordinary people struggled to define and enforce the boundaries of acceptable behavior, belonging, and shared space in daily life. It also considers how those marked as troublesome or unwanted navigated, resisted, and at times exploited these forms of community regulation in pursuit of survival, autonomy, and other situational ends.

Zariyah is a recipient of a Fulbright Canada Student Award and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She has taught a survey course on African American history to 1865 and an advanced topics seminar on Black deviance, underground cultures, and radical traditions in twentieth-century U.S. history.