Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, looks at how modern chemistry altered the ways that settler colonists imagined and engaged with the environment in 19th-century settler colonial Canada. He engages with the history and philosophy of chemistry, science and technology studies, liberal political theory, and settler colonial studies to rethink Canadian history by further developing the staples thesis. Placing chemical technologies at the economic core of Canadian confederation, Sajdeep looks at how chemists provided industrious settler colonists with the necessary tools and techniques to disaggregate and refine the rocky lands, bituminous reservoirs, forested expanses, agrarian soils, and even living-beings of the Canadian hinterlands into productive resources. He reveals how chemical methods of transforming matter generated new modes of liberal governmentality across 19th-century settler colonial Canada, refining lands and bodies to their most elemental form for the sake of human health and wealth.

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, Sanghum Film and Foundation Chamar. 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.