The CHA Council

Claudine Bonner is a member of the Sociology Department and Women’s and Gender Studies program at Acadia University. Her research is grounded in African Canadian history, and broadly applied in analyses of race, gender, education, and identity in contemporary Canada. Her scholarship bridges the gap between studies of the Black Canadian experience and the broader African Diaspora, and crosses generational boundaries through innovative oral histories, community-based research, and published collaborative research with leading Canadian scholars.

The François-Xavier Garneau, CHA’s Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History, the Wallace K. Ferguson, the Fecteau prizes portfolio, EDI Committee.

A member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation, Dr. Daniel Sims comes from a long line of community-based Indigenous historians. Currently serving as the chair of First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, he was previously employed as an assistant professor of history at the University of Alberta – Augustana Campus. His research primarily focuses on the history of northern British Columbia, with his current research project examining failed economic developments and concepts of wilderness in the Finlay-Parsnip watershed and Front Ranges of the Rockies. While he waits for the communities he is working with on the project to open up again, he is currently finishing work on a forthcoming edited memoir of Norwegian free trader Einar Mortensen with a colleague in Scandinavian Studies and beginning the process of transforming his dissertation on the impacts of W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Tsek’ehne of northern British Columbia into a book.

Advocacy, History Campaign Committee.

I am a History professor at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec (on unceded Abenaki territory) who attended my first CHA conference back in 2003. Before that, I taught International Studies at the University of Regina. My research interests include Canada and the world, 20th century Southeast Asian history and the way international non-governmental organizations have deployed their own alternative diplomacies. I teach topics related to the history of the global South, the United Nations, and Canadian transnational relations. Publications include, most recently, Challenge the Strong Wind: Canada and East Timor 1975-99 and the edited collection Flowers in the Wall: Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Melanesia. I’m an associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History and a member of the international advisory council of the Centro Nacional Chega!, Timor-Leste’s Centre for Truth and Memory, and just finished a term as Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies. Before taking the leap into academia, I worked in journalism and human rights advocacy.

Portfolios: Liaison with History Departments & CHA’s Affiliated Committees

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is a historian of post-Reconstruction United States, specializing on the African American experience. Broadly, his research and writing excavate freedom linkages among the United States, Canada, and other parts of the African Diaspora.  Before arriving at McGill, he held the W. L. Mackenzie King Fellowship at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Department of History Lectureship. Dr. Adjetey’s research has garnered prizes and fellowships from many sources: SSHRC, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Princeton, to name a few. In 2017-18, he was Visiting Scholar and Pre-Doctoral Fellow at MIT, and in 2016-17, Visiting Scholar and Senior Resident Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto.

Dr. Adjetey’s first monograph—Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, 1919-1992—is under contract to the University of North Carolina Press. This project situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history—immigration, civil rights, racial identity, radicalism, surveillance, and state power—within a North American diasporic frame. He has written essays and articles for The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Walrus, and The National Post.

Portfolio: Liaison to CHA Annual Meeting Program Committee.

Meredith Terretta is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. She examines transregional legal and rights activism, both past and contemporary. She is now writing a book tentatively titled: Claimants, Advocates and Disrupters in Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories and co-editing, with Samuel Moyn, The Cambridge World History of Rights, Volume 5: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

Since 2021, her published work includes a special issue on African Refuge for the Canadian Journal of African Studies, co-edited with Philip Janzen, single-authored articles on rights, international law, and decolonization in The Law and History Review and the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and a chapter on late colonial era African land claims in Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History, edited by Steven L. B. Jensen and Charles Walton (Cambridge University Press: 2022).

Terretta is principal investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant studying the IRCC’s systemic denial of study and temporary resident permits to students and researchers from African countries. She presided the Canadian Association of African Studies in 2018-2019.

Outreach Committee to Non-Canadianists, Rethinking History in Canada.

Harvey Amani Whitfield is a Professor of Black North American History at the University of Calgary.  His books include Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 (2006), North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (2016), and Black Slavery in the Maritimes: A History in Documents (2018).  His most recent book, Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes, will be published by the University of Toronto Press in early 2022.  He is also the author of numerous book chapters and articles, including “White Archives, Black Fragments: Problems and Possibilities in Telling the Lives of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes,” in the Canadian Historical Review. In his free time, Whitfield enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter.  He also enjoys exercising and exploring Alberta.

Portfolio: EDI Committee

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

Nicholas Fast is an historian of labour and capitalism in North America at the University of Toronto. His current research is a transnational, comparative analysis on the process and experiences of deindustrialization of the meatpacking industry in Winnipeg and Chicago. His graduate career has been defined by his role in re-organizing the Graduate Student Committee of the CHA and currently sits as its chair. Nicholas is a member of both the Canadian and American Historical Associations, the SSHRC Funded project Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT), and the Canadian Business History Association.

Teaching Committee, Partnership Library and Archives Canada.