Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

Academic Opportunities

• Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship

• Rita Ross Undergraduate Prize in Canadian Studies

Upcoming Events

• Beautiful Destruction: The Tar Sands, the Post-Modern Sublime, and the Subsumption of the Earth

• Taking the Long-Term View: Technology Relations between Canada and the Bay Area in the Age of AI

External Events

• National Women’s Soccer League Canadian Heritage Night: Bay FC vs. Ottawa Rapid FC

ACADEMIC OPPORTUNITIES

Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship

The Canadian Studies Program’s signature Hildebrand Fellowship provides support for Berkeley graduate students of any citizenship whose work focuses primarily, or comparatively, on Canada. The Fellowship provides up to $5,000 per semester to fund direct travel and research expenses.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Applications should be submitted at least one month before the start of any proposed travel.

Rita Ross Undergraduate Prize in Canadian Studies

Deadline: Friday, May 1

The Rita Ross Prize recognizes an outstanding undergraduate research project related to Canada, produced for a UC Berkeley class or independent study project. The competition is open to any UC Berkeley undergraduate student in good academic standing, in any college or discipline.

One $300 cash prize is awarded to a student who has produced a superior undergraduate research paper or other original project that engages with topics, people or events related to Canada. The prize is awarded at the end of the spring semester.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If you require an accommodation to participate fully in any event below, please let us know with as much advance notice as possible by emailing canada@berkeley.edu.

Beautiful Destruction: The Tar Sands, the Post-Modern Sublime, and the Subsumption of the Earth
Thurs., April 9 | 12:00 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP

Artists, rather than scholars, were the first ones alive to the fact that something rather unusual was underway in the boreal landscape of northern Alberta. The photography of Louis Helbig and Edward Burtynsky captured the awesome destructive beauty wrought by the tar sands industry, a force capable of reshaping the Earth as if it were a canvas and the industry an abstract expressionist painter. Helbig and Burtynsky’s work evoke the sublime, but this aesthetic seems to bear little relation to the sublime described by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. It is not the vastness of nature that inspires the sublime, but rather its destruction.

The viewer of such artworks experienced an uncanny dread, without understanding why. Decades of research in ‘energy studies’ have done little to elucidate this problem. Scholars still seem to trail artists in grappling with the profound implications of the transition to non-conventional fossil fuels. This undesired Energiewende has proven much more significant than the shift to wind and solar, allowing the fossil fuel industry to tighten its grip on the planet. This talk will discuss the limits of previous approaches, such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘petro-states’, and instead will apply the Marxist categories of real and formal subsumption to understand the industry’s changing relationship to the Earth’s elementary systems.

About the Speaker

Dr. Troy Vettese is an environmental historian. He is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley, as well as a John A. Sproul Fellow with the Canadian Studies Program. He researches the transition from conventional to non-conventional fossil fuels, with a focus on the tar sands industry.

Dr. Vettese holds a PhD from New York University, and master’s degrees from the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford. He completed his undergraduate education at McGill University. Dr. Vettese has held fellowships at Harvard University; the European University Institute; Copenhagen University; and the New Institute, Hamburg. His first book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso, 2022), was co-authored with climate scientist Drew Pendergrass and has been translated into half a dozen languages.

This event will have a remote attendance option via Zoom. Please select the “virtual attendance” in the RSVP form to receive the link.

Canadians have made foundational contributions to the world’s technological advances. Before Apple and Google dominated the market, Research in Motion’s Blackberry invented the mobile office. Today’s AI landscape rests on the work of titans like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Richard Sutton, Joelle Pineau, Doina Precup, and Ilya Sutskever. Their long-term research pursuits at both universities and companies have fueled modern neural networks and machine learning.

The Bay Area, meanwhile, has long been a hub of technological innovation. It is a place where scientific theory mixes with venture funding and engineering expertise to make designs into successful products. The relationship between the Bay Area and Canada’s technological talent has always been strong, and this panel will explore the current landscape and the outlook for the future. How can we ensure that both the long-term research pursuits as well as the start-ups necessary for innovation thrive in both environments? What can we learn from the different ecosystems, and the relationships that we’ve built up to now?

About the Panelists

Timothy Barfoot is a professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and a researcher in robot autonomy and vehicle navigation technologies. He is Director of the UofT Robotics Institute, co-Faculty Advisor of UofT’s self-driving car team, and previously worked as Director of Autonomous Systems at Apple in California. Professor Barfoot holds a BASc from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from UTIAS in robotics.

Carl Choi is the President of RLWRLD USA, a physical AI startup developing robot foundation models for industrial environments. Before joining RLWRLD, he was a partner with Alumni Ventures in Silicon Valley, where he led investments in AI, robotics, and foundational technologies. Mr. Choi holds a bachelor of mathematics from the University of Waterloo, a BBA from Wilfrid Laurier University, and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Matei Zaharia is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on computer systems for large-scale workloads such as AI, data analytics and cloud computing. He is also the co-founder and CTO of Databricks, a cloud-based platform for data analytics. Prof. Zaharia holds a bachelor of mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, he taught at MIT and Stanford.

Claire Tomlin (moderator) is a professor in the Department of EECS at UC Berkeley and holds the James and Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering. Her research interests include unmanned aerial vehicles, air traffic control and modeling of biological processes. Professor Tomlin holds a BASc from the University of Waterloo, an MSc from Imperial College, London, and a PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley.

This event will have a remote attendance option via Zoom. Please select the “virtual attendance” in the RSVP form to receive the link.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

National Women’s Soccer League Canadian Heritage Night: Bay FC vs. Ottawa Rapid FC

Fri., April 17 | 7:00 pm | San Jose | Tickets

Be a part of history at the first-ever match of a Canadian team playing in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL)! Home team Bay FC also has two players on the Canadian National Team: Sydney Collins and Lysianne Proulx. Join fellow soccer fans from around the Bay and friends from the Digital Moose Lounge and Consulate to cheer on these Canadian athletes!

This unique offer, customized for all Canadian communities in the Bay Area, grants you access to a select seating location at an exclusive group rate for Bay FC’s match against the Ottawa Rapids at PayPal Park on April 17th (7pm kickoff). Doors open at 5:00 pm to enjoy the family-friendly open space, food trucks, and fan experiences.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Philosophy Hall #2308

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