Dr. Samir Gandesha

Biography

Samir Gandesha was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and immigrated to Canada with his parents in the mid-1960s. His extended family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 and entered Britain as refugees. He studied at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the London School of Economics, where he completed his undergraduate studies. He attained both his Master’s and PhD in Political Science at York University. Gandesha was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley from 1995 to 1997 and an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Potsdam in 2001-2002. He has been teaching at Simon Fraser University since 2003 and became the Director of the Institute for Humanities in 2010. He has served as a visiting fellow at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico and has co-edited several works, including 'Capital: Reification and Spectacle' and 'Aesthetic Marx'. In 2023, he contributed to the book 'Marcuse, Adorno, and the Question of ‘Left Fascism’?' and is currently engaged in research areas that include politics, aesthetics, critical theory, phenomenology, authoritarianism, populism, and psychoanalysis.

Research Interests