Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

Program News

• Happy Asian Heritage Month!
• New Hildebrand Fellow, Lianne Koren, studies history of Montreal’s Jewish institutions
• Canadian Studies welcomes legal scholar Ayelet Shachar as new faculty affiliate

External Events

• Erased, Displaced, Misplaced: Reclaiming [Asian Canadian] National Identity Through the Arts.
• MSNBC’s Ali Velshi: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy
• Conférence: La littérature et la chanson autochtones du Québec

PROGRAM NEWS

Happy Asian Heritage Month!

May is Asian Heritage Month in both Canada and the USA. This month, we celebrate the diverse communities of the Asian diaspora in North America, and their many contributions to Canadian and American society.

In Canada, this year’s official theme is “Preserving the Past, Embracing the Future: Amplifying Asian Canadian Legacy”. It celebrates the rich cultural heritage of the 20% of Canadians with Asian ancestry, while looking to the future with optimism. Canadian Heritage offers a good introduction to learn more about the varied experiences of Canada’s Asian communities, such as major historical events, prominent contemporary figures, and region-specific community and educational organizations.

Did you know? The first recorded Asian people arrived in Canada in 1788, when British fur trader John Meares brought 50 Chinese carpenters to Vancouver Island to build a trading post. Today, Vancouver is a center of Chinese-Canadian culture, and has the highest concentration of Asian Canadians in the country – just under 50% of residents are of Asian descent!

New Hildebrand Fellow, Lianne Koren, Studies History of Montreal’s Jewish Institutions

Canadian Studies is pleased to introduce Lianne Koren as the recipient of an Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship for Summer-Fall 2024.

Lianne is a PhD student in History, with a designated emphasis on Jewish studies. Her current project looks at a history of the Canadian state through the lens of Jewish institutions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Montreal’s growing Jewish community organized its own educational and healthcare institutions under the confessional system then prevalent in Quebec. As the government expanded its role in public services over the 20th century, these institutions operated in dialogue with authorities increasingly involved in funding and regulating areas once exclusively overseen by religious bodies. Lianne’s project asks what the trajectory of these institutions reveals about relations between the Jewish community and the government during the 20th century.

Lianne’s Hildebrand Fellowship will allow her to conduct archival research in the two Jewish community archives in Montreal, as well as visit the national archives in Ottawa and the Archives nationales in Quebec City.

Lianne holds a BA in history and religious studies, and a master’s in history from McGill University. Her previous research includes a study on a brief immigration program in the 1950s that allowed North African Jews to settle in Canada during a period of restrictive immigration policy, as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations. Her research languages are English, French, and Hebrew.

Canadian Studies Welcomes Legal Scholar Ayelet Shachar as New Faculty Affiliate

Canadian Studies is pleased to announce that Ayelet Shachar, a legal scholar specializing in immigration, citizenship, and multiculturalism, has joined the program as our newest faculty affiliate.

Professor Shachar joined the Berkeley faculty last year as the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Chair in Comparative Law. She previously held the R.F. Harney Chair in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto. She is also a former Scientific Member of Germany’s Max Planck Society, and past director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Professor Shachar has published extensively on the topics of citizenship theory, immigration law, highly skilled migration and global inequality, multiculturalism and women’s rights, law and religion in comparative perspective, and the fraught relations between human rights law and territorial conceptions of sovereignty. She is the author of over one hundred articles and book chapters, as well as several major books. Shachar’s research has received international acclaim, and informed key law and policy debates around the world. Her work has been cited by authorities from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Professor Shachar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2014. In 2019, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany’s most prestigious research award. Shachar is an Honorary Professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt Faculty of Law, and a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She received her BA and LLB from Tel Aviv University, and her LLM and JSD from Yale.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Erased, Displaced, Misplaced: Reclaiming [Asian Canadian] National Identity Through the Arts.

Tuesday, May 14 | 10:00 am | Online | RSVP

Rachel Wong (Seneca Polytechnic, Toronto) explores some of the conversations currently taking place within Asian Canadian literary and artistic circles as they relate to coalitional spaces and community building. Specifically, she looks at the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop – a group of writers, scholars, and activists – as well as a coop radio program from Vancouver titled Pender Guy. To do this, Wong first excavates a social history of the Asian Canadian community collective of artists, before addressing the present moment of Asian Canadian literature and situating it within the present CanLit moment and addressing the space it currently occupies.

This event is part of the “Populations Rendered ‘Surplus’ in Canada” series, sponsored by the Center for Canadian-American Studies at Western Washington University, Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, The Ray Wolpow Institute, and The Foundation for WWU & Alumni

MSNBC’s Ali Velshi: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

Tuesday, May 14 | 12:00 pm | San Francisco, CA | Tickets

Small acts of courage matter—and sometimes they change the world. More than a century ago, MSNBC host Ali Velshi’s great-grandfather sent his seven-year-old son to live at Gandhi’s ashram in South Africa. From childhood, Velshi’s grandfather was imbued with an ethos of public service and social justice, and a belief in absolute equality among all people – ideals that his children carried forward as they escaped apartheid, moving to Canada and the United States.

Velshi’s new book Small Acts of Courage taps into 125 years of family history to advocate for social justice as a living, breathing experience: a way of life more than an ideology. In a conversation with Canadian Consul General Rana Sarkar, Velshi will relate the stories of regular people who made a lasting commitment to fight for change, even when success seemed impossible, and explore how we can breathe new life into the principles of pluralistic democracy. This event will also be webcast live.

Conférence: La littérature et la chanson autochtones du Québec

Jeudi, 23 mai | 6:00 pm | San Francisco, CA | RSVP

Dans le cadre du programme Arts, Lettres et Communication, profil littérature et création, du cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe au Québec, en collaboration avec l’Alliance française de San Francisco, dix étudiants prononceront une conférence sur la littérature et la chanson autochtones du Québec. La poétesse Joséphine Bacon et l’artiste multidisciplinaire Samian seront à l’honneur lors de cette soirée. Les œuvres de ces artistes ont en commun les réalités des peuples des Premières Nations, c’est-à-dire le rapport particulier au territoire, les questions identitaires, plusieurs enjeux politico-historiques, etc. Le public aura aussi l’occasion de discuter avec les étudiants et les enseignantes après la conférence. Un vin d’honneur sera servi.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Philosophy Hall #2308

WEBSITE | EMAIL | DONATE