The CHA Nominating Committee

Erin Spinney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Politics at the University of New Brunswick’s Saint John campus. Her research examines late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British military and naval systems of care focusing on nurses and other women labourers. She frequently considers the intersections of environment and health and how medical officers’ perceptions of landscape, climate, and ‘healthiness’ influenced their decisions throughout the Atlantic World. She is now a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded “Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region, c.1500-present” project.

Valérie Lapointe Gagnon is Associate Professor of History at Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, and Director of the Marcelle and Louis Desrochers Institute for Heritage Studies and Transdisciplinary Research on Francophonies. She is interested in the intellectual and political history of contemporary Canada and Quebec, women’s history, Canadian francophonies, constitutional issues and Canada-Quebec relations. In 2018, she published the essay Panser le Canada : une histoire intellectuelle de la Commission Laurendeau-Dunton (Boréal), winner of the Prix de la présidence de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec. Since 2024, she has been a member of the Canadian government’s external advisory group on the creation and dissemination of scientific information in French.

Andrew Nurse is Associate Professor of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University where he teaches courses on landscape, public history, and the history of popular protest. He is a member of the CHA’s Teaching and Learning Committee and is involved in research into issues related to student success in higher education. He serves on the board of Acadiensis and is a former Associate Editor of The Journal of Canadian Studies. His recent work has appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Canadian Dimension, Acadiensis, The Conversation, and as posts on Activehistory.ca. His published work also includes the edited collections (with Mike Fox) Dynamics and Trajectories: Canada and/in North American and (with Raymond Blake), Beyond National Dreams: Essays on Canadian Citizenship and Nationalism. He is currently working on a history of The 4th Estate, a 1970s alternate newspaper.

Karissa Robyn Patton (she/her) is a historian of gender, sexuality, health, and activism. Patton is a White Settler woman who lived and studied in Treaty 7 and Treaty 6 Territories until 2022. She currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she works as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. Her work uses reproductive justice frameworks, oral history interviewing, and engagement methodologies, with a focus on bring the past in conversation with present day reproductive and sexual health matters. Her Wellcome Trust funded project, Reproductive Justice, Healthcare & History, explores comparative and community engaged histories reproductive healthcare and activism in Scotland and Prairie Canada between 1967 and the 1980s. She is also part of the CIHR project, Pelvic Health & Public Health in 20th Century Canada. You can find her some of her published work in Bucking Conservatism (open access) in the Canadian Journal for Health History, the Canadian Historical Review, and Health & History.