Biography
Kaileigh La Belle (she/they) is a research fellow with the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative. In 2023, she completed a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) and in 2025, completed a Master of Arts in History at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada).
Currently a PhD student in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University, Kaileigh is exploring the relationship between queer vernacular culture and gendered and sexual politics. Their doctoral research explores fan fiction through a queer historical lens, treating fan fiction as an archive of both the personal and the communal. Their research analyzes the dis/continuities in how fan fiction communities across the English-speaking world understood and related their fan fiction to late-twentieth and early-twenty first century queer and feminist politics. By placing fan fictions within their political, social, and historical contexts, her research seeks to understand how fan fiction has been archived (or not) and is, in itself, archival. Ultimately, their research advocates for the potential of fan fiction in studying and writing queer cultural histories.