Office Location: NF232
Email: maria.cichosz@utoronto.ca
Office Hours: Mondays and Thursdays 12:00-1:00 PM, or by appointment
Website: mariacichosz.com
Degrees:
BA (English; Book and Media Studies) – University of Toronto
MA (Women and Gender Studies) – University of Toronto
PhD (Modern Thought & Literature) – Stanford University
Maria Cichosz is a writer and scholar of post-1945 literature, art, and theory, with a particular interest in drug histories and cultures. Her work has appeared in places like Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, and on the CBC Literary Awards shortlist, and received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is the author of two novels, Cam & Beau (Now or Never, 2020) and Middlemen, which will be published in Fall 2026. She's currently writing On Drugs, a forthcoming entry in Biblioasis's Field Notes series.
Before coming to Victoria College, Maria was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and taught in the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Professional Writing and Communication Program. She was the Fiction and Reviews Editor at Broken Pencil magazine and is currently an Associate Book Reviews Editor at The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs journal.
As the Director of the Victoria College Writing Centre, Maria encourages students to approach their writing with a sense of wonder, open-mindedness, and a willingness to grow. She brings a process-based approach to her writing pedagogy in fiction and creative non-fiction, while her humanities seminars use broad critical frameworks to examine complex cultural formations by bringing together perspectives from art, literature, history, and science.
Publications: https://utoronto.academia.edu/MariaCichosz