Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto where he is currently writing about the history and philosophy of chemical governance in 19th century Canada. His dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, looks at how chemistry altered the way that settler colonists imagined and engaged with the environment in 19th century Canada. His objective is to place chemistry at the very heart of Canadian history, looking at how chemical knowledge not only provided industrious settler colonists with the tools and techniques to visualize and render the rocky lands, bituminous earth and waters of the Canadian hinterlands economically productive, but powerfully furnished their imaginations. Taking chemistry as a novel way of thinking about lands and bodies, he considers how chemical consciousness transformed economic thought, legal governance, medicine, social theory, environmental conservation, and artistic expression in 19th century Canada.

Sajdeep currently holds the Graduate Fellowship in Sustainability Transitions at the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability (IECS) and the Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowship at Victoria College, both located at the University of Toronto. His research has been generously supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2023-25), the Graduate Student Scholarship for Studies in the History of Ideas (2023-24), the Jeanne Armour Graduate Scholarship in Canadian History (2020-25) and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship (2020-23). He is affiliated with the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) at the University of Toronto.

Sajdeep works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. He currently serves as a board member of InterAccess and collective member of Sanghum Film. Sajdeep has previously conducted research and curatorial projects for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), The Reach Gallery Museum, Trinity Square Video (TSV), the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). From 2015-2016, he held the Archie Malloch Fellowship in Public Learning at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) at McGill University. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.