Fondo RC0847 - Sylvia Nickerson fonds

Sylvia Nickerson is an award-winning comic artist and writer, as well as a historian of mathematics and science.

Nickerson trained in visual arts at Mount Allison University and Etobicoke School of the Arts. In her early career, she worked as a freelance illustrator for clients such as The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Washington Post, and others. From 2004 to 2010, she also contributed monthly illustrations to The Dominion, a co-operatively run media organization publishing grassroots Canadian journalism online.

Nickerson’s first book, All We Have Left, Is This (Ca$ino Press) was released in 2018. The book is a collection of fourteen short comic stories about daughterhood, marriage, motherhood, desire, religion, assault, loneliness, and aging. Following the publication of this volume, Nickerson was nominated for the Doug Wright Spotlight Award (“the Nipper”) for best emerging comic talent in 2019.

In 2019, Nickerson published Creation (Drawn & Quarterly), an exploration of gentrification in Hamilton, Ontario from the perspective of an artist and mother. Subsequently, Nickerson received the Nipper Doug Wright Award in 2020. Nickerson has since served as the artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2020-2021).

Nickerson is also a historian of mathematics and science; in 2014, she completed a Ph.D. at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. She was a postdoctoral researcher at York University from 2014-2017, where she worked on the editorial project “The Correspondence of John Tyndall and Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum.” Nickerson teaches courses at the University of Toronto and McMaster University.