Rate My Professor Kate Rossiter

Kate Rossiter is an Associate Professor of Health Studies in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus. She received her PhD from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto in 2009 and her MA in Performance Studies from New York University in 2002. Her scholarship is highly interdisciplinary, fusing critical theoretical approaches to health with arts-based practices, including theatre and fiction. Rossiter’s research specializations encompass critical theories of the body, disability studies, public health, the social determinants of health, theatre and performance studies, arts-based research practice, critical approaches to public health, and institutionalization and institutional histories.

As Principal Investigator of the Recounting Huronia: A Participatory Arts-Based Research Project funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant, Rossiter has examined the effects of institutional violence at the former Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia, Ontario—Canada’s first and largest residential facility for people with intellectual disabilities—since 2013. This work involves archival investigations and interviews with residents and survivors of emergency shelters, asylums, prisons, and residential schools. Her research draws from personal experience growing up with an uncle who had Down syndrome. Key publications include the co-authored book Institutional Violence and Disability: Punishing Conditions (Routledge, 2018) with Jen Rinaldi, which develops a model of institutional violence, and the co-edited volume Population Control: Theorizing Institutional Violence (McGill-Queen’s University Press), which earned the 2025 Canada Prize from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Toronto. Each winner received $4,000, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Rossiter’s contributions have advanced scholarly understanding of how institutional structures perpetuate violence against disabled populations.