The CHA Nominating Committee

Dr. Erin Millions (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Millions is a settler historian whose research centers on Indigenous children and families to explore histories of Indigenous education and health in 19^th– and 20^th-century Canada and the larger British Empire. Her work includes translating these histories to public and Indigenous audiences through community-engaged projects including the Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project (awarded the CHA 2023 Public History Prize), Indigenous Afternoons in the Archive (2021 Manitoba Day Award), the Welcoming Winnipeg Initiative, and the Canadian Geographic Paths to Reconciliation website. In addition to past work as a contract instructor at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba in departments of history and Indigenous studies, Dr. Millions has worked as a public historian and historical consultant for Parks Canada, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and the BBC. Dr. Millions is a long-time member of the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Committee on Women’s and Gender History.

Martin Robert is a Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is also a research associate at the CERMES3 laboratory (Paris) and at the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (UQAM). His research interests include the history of medical education, the 19th century, the British and French empires, the history of medicine, the history of Quebec/Canada and the history of death. His book Cette science nécessaire. Dissections humaines et formation médicale au Québec was published in 2023 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

With a doctorate in history, he spent ten years as a research assistant at the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (UQAM). His first postdoctorate, at Oxford University (2019-2021), focused on the history of medical schools in Canada and India in the context of the British Empire. His second, at the CNRS in Paris (2022-2023), focused on the history of medical education in the British and French empires.

Aaron Sidney Wright (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of History at Dalhousie University and in the Program in History of Science and Technology at the University of King’s College in Kjiputuk Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). He received his doctorate from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, after which he held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and Stanford University. His publications include More than Nothing: A History of the Vacuum in Theoretical Physics, 1925-1980 (Oxford UP 2024) and Theoretical Physics in Your Face! Selected Correspondence of Sidney Coleman, coedited with Diana Coleman and David Kaiser (World Scientific 2022). He is currently researching Canada’s nuclear history, uranium mining, and epidemiology.

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.