The CHA Council

Rachel Hope Cleves is Professor of History at the University of Victoria and a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of three prize-winning books, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association. She is presently completing a manuscript on the history of food and sex that is under contract with Polity Press. She also has her first novel, A Second Chance for Yesterday (Solaris), co-authored with her brother, coming out in August 2023.

Portfolio: Teaching Committee

Rhonda L. Hinther is a history professor at Brandon University (BU) and an active public historian.  She is the co-founder and coordinator of the BU Public History Program. Before joining BU, she worked in senior curatorial capacities at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Canadian Museum of History.  Hinther has curated numerous museum exhibitions and has consulted on and appeared in several historical films.  The documentary “The Oldest Profession in Winnipeg:  the ‘Red Light District of 1909-1912,” which she co-wrote, won the 2012 CHA Public History Prize.

Hinther’s work has appeared in Manitoba History, Atlantis, Oral History Forum, and Labour/le travail.  She is co-editor of several edited collections, including 2022’s For a Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers’ Revolt and 2020’s Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies (both University of Manitoba Press).  Her book Perogies and Politics: Canada’s Ukrainian Left, 1891-1991 (University of Toronto Press, 2018) was a 2019 Wilson Prize Finalist.

She is presently writing a book on an extended Ukrainian-Jewish family’s WWII internment experiences.

Portofolio: Clio Prizes, John Bullen Prize, Albert B. Corey Prize

Lianne Leddy (Anishinaabekwe) is an associate professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University on the Haldimand Tract. She is a member of Serpent River First Nation and grew up in Elliot Lake, Ontario, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory.  Her research focuses on Indigenous history in what is now Canada, especially issues related to land and gender, and employs Indigenous, western, and performance art methodologies in her work.

Leddy’s monograph, Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake, was published by University of Toronto Press and she was honoured to deliver the Dr. Anne Clendinning Memorial Lecture in 2022. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Historical Review, Oral History Forum, a regular column in Herizons magazine, and several edited collections.

Leddy’s past service experience includes but is not limited to coordinating the Indigenous Studies program at Laurier, serving on the CHA’s Clio Ontario prize committee, and sitting on the SSHRC Insight Development Grant committee for Indigenous research. Her work was recognized by the OCUFA Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction in 2018.

Portfolios: Teaching Committee & EDI Committee

Neilesh is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair of Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria.  He has also served as a visiting professor at Ashoka University and Queens College in New York City. His research interests include modern religion and secularism, the history of colonial India, and the history of early post-colonial South Asia with specialization in West Bengal and Bangladesh. His book Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Bengal (Delhi and Oxford, 2014) explores late colonial and early postcolonial histories of East Bengal and Bangladesh. As a historian invested in global and comparative history, his publications include a special edition in the Journal of World History, and the edited volumes India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization (Leiden and Delhi, 2022) and South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (London, 2020). His journal articles on topics such as religion, race, and migration appear in Modern Asian Studies, South Asia Research, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Portfolios: Advocacy

Since 2015, I’ve been working as a historian at the Canadian Museum of History, as Curator of Media and Communications. With a PhD in history from Université Laval and a master’s degree from York University, I founded HistoireEngagee.ca, the French-language counterpart to ActiveHistory magazine, in 2009. At the time, I was its general coordinator. In 2014, I published the book Construire la nation au petit écran (Septentrion), a finalist for the 2016 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences. I recently worked on the exhibition From Pepinot to Paw Patrol – Television of Our childhoods and on the publication of its catalog. I’m currently doing research on children’s programming and the representation of diversity.

As a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Historical Association, I would like to build bridges between French and English-speaking researchers, as well as between those working in and out of universities, especially in museums.

Portfolios: Fecteau, Wallace-K.-Ferguson, meilleur livre savant en histoire du Canada et Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History prizes.

Whitney Wood is Canada Research Chair in the Historical Dimensions of Women’s Health at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, BC. After completing undergraduate and MA work at Lakehead University, she earned a PhD in History from Wilfrid Laurier University (Tri-University Graduate Program), and held postdoctoral fellowships at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Calgary before joining VIU in 2019. Wood’s research explores histories of health, gender, and the body in modern Canada, focusing on reproduction, obstetrics, gynecology, and cultural and medical representations of pain. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Historical Review, Social History of Medicine, and Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, in addition to a number of edited collections including Medicare’s Histories: Origins, Omissions, and Opportunities in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2022) and Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave (University of British Columbia Press, 2022). Wood is currently working on her first book, Birth Pangs: Maternity, Medicine, and Feminine Delicacy in English Canada, 1867-1940, and serves as English-language editor for the Canadian Journal of Health History.

Portfolios: Liaison with History Department Chairs and Affiliated Committees to the CHA

Alison Norman is a historian working for the federal government, at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. She is also graduate faculty member in the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies & Indigenous Studies at Trent University. She has previously worked as a historian and researcher at several places, including the Ontario Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, the Yellowhead Institute, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as at a historical research firm and for a law firm working for First Nations. She has published articles in Indigenous and women’s history, and is a founding member of the Mohawk Institute Research Group. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book on the history of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s first and longest running residential school, to be published in 2025. She is also the book review editor for Ontario History. Alison has also taught at several universities and colleges as well as offered courses for seniors in Indigenous history through various lifelong learning organizations. Her past service includes sitting as a member of the Board of Directors for the Ontario Historical Society, and as a Council Member for the Canadian Historical Association from 2016 to 2019.

A graduate of UQAM in 2001 and of the University of Ottawa in 2008, Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon has been teaching U.S. history since 2005, mainly at the University of Ottawa, the Université de Montréal and UQAM. Godefroy’s commitment to the historical community seeks to value the contribution of precarious teachers to higher education, as well as to valorize historical knowledge in civil society. Since 2009, Godefroy has been active with the lecturers’ unions at UQAM and UdeM; since 2022, he has been an elected officer of the Syndicat des chargé.e.s de cours de l’Université de Montréal (SCCCUM-CSN).

I am of mixed Kanyen’keha:ka (Mohawk) and Irish/English/Dutch ancestry, and a registered member of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (Ontario) and was born and raised in Winnipeg. My father and his siblings were survivors of the Mohawk Institute and struggled to pass on language and culture to us. Most of my family resides off-reserve now except for one cousin and her family, as well as more distant relations such as the Monture family. I am a single mom of two adult children and come from a “non-traditional” educational journey as I was a high school drop-out and entered University as a mature student. My research interests include urban Indigenous histories such as migration to urban areas, labour, cultural identity in an urban context, and education. My dissertation focussed on imagery and representations of Indigenous peoples via the National Film Board in the mid-twentieth century. Other research interests include the history of the NFB in general, local Winnipeg history and the Indigenous history of the region, Indigenous horticultural histories, Indigenous clothing histories, Settler-Indigenous relations, and Settler paganism and appropriation.

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra (Sharn) is a historian, educator, storyteller, and founder of Belonging Matters Consulting. Sharn worked as Coordinator at the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV for more than 12 years and as co-curator and co-manager of the Sikh Heritage Museum, National Historic Site and Gur Sikh Temple (gurdwara). Sharn became the first Sikh person to complete her PhD from the Department of History at UBC in 2022. Her PhD looks at the affective experiences of museum visitors through a critical race theory lens with the dissertation is titled “Museums as Spaces of Belonging: Racialized Power in the Margins.” Sharn is a passionate activist, building bridges between community and academia through museum work. She has been featured in the Knowledge Network series “B.C: An Untold History,” is co-author of “Challenging Racist BC: 150 Years and Counting,” and has been featured on local, and international podcasts and media.

Aino Pihlak is a trans woman, PhD student at the University of Toronto, and social historian of past articulations of trans feminine existence. In addition to her interest in studies of historical trans feminine desirability, she is a scholar of twentieth-century, Anglophone trans feminine subcultures. She hopes her analyses of the complexities and messiness of past trans lives honours those who built the path she now walks on.