Clara A.B. Joseph

Clara A. B. Joseph is Calgary Poet Laureate, 2026–2028, and a professor of English at the University of Calgary, with an adjunct appointment in Religious Studies. Her scholarship and public writing bring together South Asian Christianity, Thomas Christian history, postcolonial and decolonial studies, poetry and public culture.

Her most recent scholarly book, India’s Nonviolent Freedom Struggle: The Thomas Christians (1599–1799) (Routledge, 2024), examines Thomas Christian resistance to European ecclesiastical and colonial power as part of India’s longer history of nonviolent freedom struggle. She is also the author of Christianity in India: The Anti-Colonial Turn (Routledge, 2019), available open access from the publisher, and The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008).

Her poetry collections are M/OTHER (2024), Dandelions for Bhabha (2018) and The Face of the Other: A Long Poem (2016). As poet laureate, she approaches poetry as a form of civic listening—a way for cities to attend to memory, language, grief, belonging and public life.