Black Canadian history, African diaspora, Atlantic slavery, Feminist and women’s studies, Black literatures and oratures
Celebrated as a multidisciplinary scholar, author, and artist, Dr. Afua Cooper was recently invested with the Order of Nova Scotia, the province’s highest honour. Her 13 books range across such genres as history, poetry, fiction, and children’s literature.
Afua Cooper recently joined the University of Toronto Scarborough where she is now the Inaugural Distinguished Professor of Black Canadian and African Diasporas Histories, and Feminist Epistemologies. Previously, she held a Killam Research Chair at Dalhousie. Dr. Cooper has put Black Studies on the map in Canada by ensuring the infrastructural development of Black studies by founding and launching the Black Canadian Studies Association. She founded and co-ordinated the Black Studies program at Dalhousie University. Afua’s engagement with Black studies, anti-racism, EDI, and epistemic disruptions in the Canadian academy has made her not only a national figure but an international one as well.
In 2021, Dr. Cooper received over one-million dollar in funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage to research Black Canadian history across time and space. As the PI for this project A Black People’s History of Canada, Afua led a team of researchers and curriculum developers to explore and mobilize knowledge about Black people’s history in Canada and the African Diaspora.
She is the acknowledged authority on Black Canadian history and a leading expert in Black Canadian studies. Her book on Canadian slavery, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Slavery in Canada and the Burning of Old Montreal broke new ground in the study of Canadian and Atlantic slavery, and women’s history. Dr. Cooper has curated and co-curated ten exhibits on Black history and culture. The most recent, “A History Exposed: The Enslavement of Black People in Canada” is the first national exhibit of slavery in Canada and opened at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 on 1 August 2024.
Dr. Cooper was part of the collaborative team that recently won the SSHRC Impact Connection Award (2024) for Outstanding Research Collaboration: Trans-Atlantic Pilgrimage: African Histories, Poetry, Music.
Afua Cooper was a Fellow at the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, where she conducted research on slavery and higher education, and was part of an international cohort of scholars engaged in similar work. In 2021, Prof. Cooper was appointed as the Canadian representative for UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee Slave Route Project.
An eminent poet, Afua is a founder of the Dub Poetry Movement in Canada. In 2020 she was Awarded the Portia White Prize, Nova Scotia’s highest recognition for the arts, and was nominated for the Premier of Ontario’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Her latest book of poetry, The Halifax Explosion, was recently released to wide acclaim.
In addition, Dr. Cooper earned the Nova Scotia Human Rights Award for her contribution to education, the Bob Marley Prize from the City of Toronto, the Harry Jerome Award, and was acknowledged by Maclean’s magazine as one of the 50 most influential Canadians. Moreover, Afua was conferred with honorary doctorates by Simon Fraser University and the University of Ottawa. She also earned Canada’s most prestigious history award, the Royal Society of Canada J.B. Tyrrell Historical Medal for outstanding contribution to Canadian history. Afua Cooper’s papers are housed at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto.
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English
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Modern Canadian, Black Canadian, Race, Immigration, Law
Barrington Walker is an historian of Modern Canada who focuses on the histories of Blacks, race immigration and the law. His work seeks to illuminate the contours of Canadian modernity by exploring Canada’s emergence as racial state through its histories of white supremacy, slavery, colonization/immigration, segregation and Jim Crowism. Much of his work considers how these practices were legitimized, and in some instances contested, by the rule of law and legal institutions.
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English
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Postwar business, economic and political history
Dimitry Anastakis is the LR Wilson/RJ Currie Chair in Canadian Business History at the University of Toronto in the Department of History and the Rotman School of Management. He specializes in postwar business, economic and political history, with a focus on business-state relations and the auto industry in Canada.
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English
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Labour history, Mennonite history, food history
Janis Thiessen specializes in Canadian histories of labour, Mennonites, and food. Her/their research approaches include oral history, public history, and digital history. Publications include Manufacturing Mennonites (UTP 2013), NOT Talking Union (MQUP 2016), Snacks (U of M Press 2017), Necessary Idealism (CMU Press 2018), and mmm…Manitoba (with Kimberley Moore, UM Press 2024). Thiessen is principal investigator on the Manitoba Food History Project (https://www.manitobafoodhistory.ca/).
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English
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Taxation and public finance
Shirley Tillotson specializes in modern Canadian history, socio-political history, taxation history, and gender and women’s history. She received critical recognition for her books, Contributing Citizens: Modern Charitable Fundraising and the Making of the Welfare State, 1920-66 (2008), and The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Postwar Ontario (2000)
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English
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Legal history, bankruptcy and insolvency, debtor/creditor law
Virginia Torrie is a lawyer and an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba. She specializes in the legal history of Canadian bankruptcy and insolvency law. Her approach is socio-political and attentive to the way interest groups, federalism, unintended consequences, and accidents of timing influence legal changes. Her book Reinventing Bankruptcy Law: A History of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (UTP 2020) provides the first historical account of Canada’s premier restructuring regime for large companies.
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English
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Canadian foreign policy
Adam Chapnick studies the history of Canadian foreign policy. He has published extensively on Canadian contributions to the United Nations, Canada-US relations, and Canadian diplomatic practice more generally.
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English
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Canada’s external relations
Robin Gendron is an expert in Canadian foreign relations, la francophonie, Cold War history, and the international history of Canadian multinational corporations. He has also researched Canada’s relations with other members of the Francophonie and with developing countries, and the international interests of Canadian mining companies. He is currently studying the expansion of Canadian/North American interests in the Pacific region, responses to the internationalisation and globalisation of the nickel industry, and relations between Canada, the United States, and France in the late 20th century.
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English
French
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Canada-US relations; environmental history/diplomacy; Great Lakes-St. Lawrence
Daniel Macfarlane’s research focuses on Canadian-American transborder environmental history and policy, especially in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. He is the author of Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on Canada-US border waters, and is completing a book on the transnational engineering of Niagara Falls. He is also working on a survey history of Canadian-American environmental and water relations, and a project on the history of the International Joint Commission.
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English
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Canada-US history, migration from Canada, and the history of disasters
Jacob Remes is a historian of the United States and Canada, with particular expertise in disasters (natural and otherwise), labor and other social movements, migration, and religion. He is the author of several articles on these topics and is completing a book on working-class experience of, and response to, disasters in U.S. and Canadian cities.
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English
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