UVic researchers

Mo Bradley

Award-winning filmmaker, Mo Bradley, has created over fifty short films that have screened at festivals around the globe. Bradley’s first feature, Two 4 One, won the Best Canadian Film Award at the Victoria Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Available Light Film Festival in the Yukon. Two 4 One took home the audience award at Translations, Seattle's transgender film festival. The film’s lead actor, Gavin Crawford, won the 2015 ACTRA-TO Award for Outstanding Performance—Male for his portrayal of transgender hero, Adam. Veteran BC Actor, Gabrielle Rose, won a Leo Award for Best Supporting Performance for her role in the film. Two 4 One has screened at dozens of festivals around the globe and is available internationally on iTunes and Google Play in seven languages. Mo has received two major technology infrastructure grants from Canada Foundation for Innovation and regularly sits on juries with the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. In 1992, Bradley reached her largest audience of 10 million on the CBC youth TV series, Road Movies. Long before Ellen DeGeneres came out on TV , Bradley beat her to it on CBC's Road Movies. Mo has directed more than forty short films and videos, four film installations, and two web art projects. Bradley is a Professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, teaching screenwriting and film production.  

Rachel Hope Cleves

A historian and professor at the University of Victoria, Rachel Hope Cleves is the author of three books, Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (2020), Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (2014), and The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (2009). Published in 2018, her article, "Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man: The Life of Frank Shimer, 1826-1901” can be found in The Journal of the History of Sexuality. In March of 2023, Cleves published an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled, "History Exposes the Real Reason Republicans Are Trying to Ban Drag Shows." Her research has also been featured in The Boston Globe, salon.com and brainpickings.org. Cleves' current project is titled, A Historian's Guide to Food and Sex.

Aaron Devor

Dr. Aaron H Devor, PhD, FSSSS, FSTLHE, is an internationally recognized leader in Transgender Studies who has been studying and teaching about transgender topics since the early 1980s. He established and holds the world’s first Chair in Transgender Studies; initiated and hosts the international, interdisciplinary Moving Trans History Forward conferences; and founded and is the subject matter expert for the world’s largest Transgender Archives. He has published widely on transgender topics, including as an author of four books and editor of one.

He is the author of numerous well-cited scholarly articles, and the widely-acclaimed books Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989) and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1997, 2nd edition forthcoming). Devor's most recent book, The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future (2014) was a Lambda Literary Awards finalist in LGBT nonfiction. He has delivered lectures to audiences around the world, including more than 20 keynote and plenary addresses. Devor has also been an author of versions of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care since 1999 (versions 6, 7, & 8), and guided the translation of version 7 into world languages.

Dr. Devor is a 3M national-award-winning teacher, a former Dean of Graduate Studies (2002-2012), an elected member of the International Academy of Sex Research, and an elected Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. He is currently a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

Cindy Holmes

Cindy Holmes is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Victoria. Her interdisciplinary and collaborative research explores connections between wellbeing, belonging, storytelling and resistance in various communities. Her research and teaching interests include: Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (2SLGBTQ+) belonging and wellbeing; critical race feminist theories of intersectionality; decolonization; violence; place and identity; food justice; spirituality and social justice; intergenerational storytelling; participatory action research and arts-based research. For over 25 years, Cindy worked in community organizations in the areas of violence intervention, community development, counseling and advocacy, social justice education and research.

Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt is an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Victoria. He is also a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His debut documentary feature, Framing Agnes, was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, which was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress.

Nathan Lachowsky

Nathan Lachowsky is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. Championing interdisciplinary and community-based participatory approaches, he has conducted HIV and sexual health research with gay, bi and queer cis and trans men, including Two-Spirit Indigenous men across Canada and New Zealand. 

Nathan's principal area of research focuses on social and behavioural epidemiology and the importance of developing and analyzing quantitative public health data to inform public health practice, health service provision, and policy. While fundamentally trained as an epidemiologist, he conducts interdisciplinary mixed methods research within a social justice framework in order to achieve health equity for marginalized communities.

Margot Wilson

Margot Wilson is a cultural anthropologist interested in culture change, international development and planned change. Her early research has focused primarily on Bangladesh but she has spent a considerable amount of time in India.

Margot's research has focused on women's work in homestead gardens, stigmatization of leprosy patients and abandonment of women and children in Bangladesh. She is interested in women's narratives and the ways in which women represent their lived experiences, especially through letters. Most recently, her interests in gender and narrative have come together in a project focused on life histories of transgender elders. Margot is the owner and editor at TransGender Publishing.