Two Canadian scholars are challenging how we understand our history. Dr. Anne Lindsay and Dr. Sarah York-Bertram are The University of Winnipeg’s 2024 H. Sanford Riley Fellows who will spend their tenure as post-docs who shed new light on our understanding of Canadian history.
The Riley Postdoctoral Fellowship provides early-career scholars with the opportunity to further develop their academic research while integrating innovative perspectives and methodologies in their research that challenges old narratives and viewing history with a different lens.
UWinnipeg faculty and students benefit from having these historians engage with our community of scholars, who both bring deep expertise in community-engaged historical scholarship.
Dr. Erin Millions
“Dr. York-Bertram’s and Dr. Lindsay’s research and teaching center innovative perspectives on Canadian histories that connect with contemporary issues in Canadian society,” shared UWinnipeg’s Dr. Erin Millions, historian and advisor to the Fellows. “UWinnipeg faculty and students benefit from having these historians engage with our community of scholars, who both bring deep expertise in community-engaged historical scholarship.”
Dr. Lindsay will expand on her award-winning PhD thesis Especially in this Free Country: Webs of Empire, Slavery and the Fur Trade, for publication with McGill-Queen’s University Press.
She challenges Canadians to explore the history of chattel slavery and racialized unfreedom that underpin many of the issues we are facing today, including the history and legacy of Indian Residential Schools, human trafficking, and 2SMMIWG+.
Her thesis explores chattel slavery from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, positioning it as part of Canada’s national pre-history, with a particular focus on the fur trade, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Rupert’s Land.
“This fellowship allows me to stay in Winnipeg, with access to the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives’ holdings, which are essential to my research, and to the expertise and secondary material at UWinnipeg’s Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies,” said Dr. Lindsay.
Dr. Lindsay makes a critical contribution to the growing recognition of the historical existence of slavery in Canada by demonstrating that chattel slavery existed in the Canadian fur trade just as it did in the French and British Empires connected to the trade.
“The Riley Fellowship offers me a unique opportunity to focus on my work supported by UWinnipeg’s Department of History’s academic strength, and especially by its faculty, including a number of members (particularly Dr. Erin Millions, my supervisor) who work in relevant and related fields.”
Dr. York-Bertram is an interdisciplinary scholar with experience in women’s and gender studies, history, psychology, sociology, digital humanities, and community-based research. She will spend her two-year fellowship fostering a community of practice around the history of emotions at UWinnipeg as well as expand on her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded doctoral dissertation (York University).
Her doctoral dissertation explores the affective basis of judgments and narratives surrounding sex work in the western Canadian prairie provinces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Dr. York-Bertram locates narratives, emotions, patterns of relating, and judgments in emergent settler colonial journalist, political, and juridical fields. She explores diverse western Canadian women’s histories of emotion as they organized around their experiences of and concerns over sex work and addresses the gendered gap in this history by applying an intersectional, interdisciplinary approach aiming for cognitive justice.
“Studies of western Canadian emotions histories can help us to understand the affective texture of structure, and contextualize, and historicize patterns of relating between regions and diverse people,” shared Dr. York-Bertram.
The H. Sanford Riley Fellowship in Canadian History promotes public engagement with the study of Canada’s history at The University of Winnipeg and in the wider community. Both Dr. York-Bertram and Dr. Lindsay will deliver public lectures highlighting their research as part of the terms of their Riley fellowships.
The Department of History is hosting the 2024 Riley Lecture in Canadian History on October 9, 7-8:30 p.m., in Convocation Hall. It will include a panel discussion titled “Winnipeg 150: Community Perspectives on Celebrating Winnipeg’s Past,” featuring panelists Elder Dr. Albert McLeod, Nadia Thompson, Alex Judge, Sabrina Janke, Shauna MacKinnon, and moderated by Niigaanwewidam Sinclair.
This event is free and open to the public. A virtual option is available with pre-registration.
