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Canadian Studies Announcements
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In This Issue:
Program News
• Reminder: Big Give is next Thursday!
• New Undergraduate Fellow, Jocelyn Liu, studies impact of short-term rentals on rural housing market
Academic Opportunities
• Financial support opportunity for doctoral students (Immigration Research Initiative, Concordia University)
• Call for papers: 2026 MANECCS Conference: “Building Bridges”
Upcoming Events
• Building and Fracturing Transnational Nativist Coalitions: Canada, Catholic Immigrants, and the Venezuela Boundary Dispute of 1895
• Haitcistut: Heiltsuk – Reconciliation from Below
External Events
• On the Outside, Looking Out: Canada’s Rural Communities as Stewards of Landscapes and the Land
• Film Screening: “Kill the Documentary” (feat. Joyce Wieland) |
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Reminder: Big Give is Next Thursday!
In just a little over a week, the Berkeley community will come together to support the campus initiatives that matter to them. Help ensure that Canadian Studies is on that list by making a donation of your own! Your donation will help raise the profile of Canadian Studies at the number one public university in the United States. Nothing makes a statement about the importance of Canada like a gift supporting student research, public education, and community building. So get ready to give big on March 12! |
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New Undergraduate Fellow, Jocelyn Liu, studies impact of short-term rentals on rural housing market
The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Jocelyn Liu has been awarded an Undergraduate Research Fellowship for Summer 2026.
Jocelyn is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in environmental science and environmental economics & policy in the Rausser College of Natural Resources. Jocelyn grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, where she developed a passion for community-engaged policy, especially related to the housing and energy sectors. She has been a research assistant for various projects across the departments of Environmental Science, Policy and Management; Geography; and UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.
Jocelyn’s fellowship will support her research analyzing the impact of short-term rentals (STRs) in rural Ontario, as well as the regulatory responses to them. STRs are often economic keystones for small municipalities now reliant on tourism, and create unique tensions between economic development, housing affordability, and municipal governance. The project will expand the existing body of literature on Canadian STR markets that primarily focus on large urban cores like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Jocelyn’s fellowship will enable her to travel to east-central Ontario to interview local community members, politicians, and planners about their perceptions of STRs.
Jocelyn’s research is being overseen by Hildebrand Fellow Allison Evans, and will contribute data towards Allison’s dissertation project, which examines the mechanisms behind increasing homelessness in semi-rural and rural communities in Ontario. Jocelyn has worked with Allison since last fall through Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). |
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ACADEMIC OPPORTUNITIES
Financial Support Opportunity for Doctoral Students (Immigration Research Initiative, Concordia University)
Deadline: March 27 | Learn more
The Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) located in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, Montreal, announces its Doctoral Visiting Fellowship competition. IRI is seeking applications for three 3-month doctoral fellowships for Fall 2026 or Winter/Spring 2027 in the field of immigration.
Priority will be given to projects focusing on Quebec and/or any other multinational states, but proposed projects may also focus on other case studies, including, but not limited to, countries, nations, or regions characterized by significant immigration.
The successful candidates will work in collaboration with Antoine Bilodeau and/or Mireille Paquet and receive up to CAD $8,000 to cover travel and living expenses. |
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| Call for Papers: 2026 MANECCS Conference: “Building Bridges”
Deadline: March 31 | Learn more
Canada and the United States share one of the world’s closest, most complex relationships – marked by cooperation and competition, friendship and rivalry, and common projects and contested borders. The Middle Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies (MANECCS) invites scholars, students, and practitioners to reflect on these lines of contact, the cycles of collaboration and conflict, and the cultural, political, and economic bridges that connect the two countries. The organization’s 2026 conference will take place from 22-24 October 2026 in Lake Placid, NY.
For questions about the program, logistics, or submissions please contact Dr. Claire-Marie Brisson (President) or Dr. Brendan Shanahan (Vice President) |
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Building and Fracturing Transnational Nativist Coalitions: Canada, Catholic Immigrants, and the Venezuela Boundary Dispute of 1895
Thurs., March 12 | 12:00 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP
This presentation examines the rise and fall of the domestic and transnational coalitional politics of the American Protective Association (APA). At its apogee in the early-to-mid 1890s, the APA was the largest nativist society in the United States. It was also led by a Canadian immigrant, W. J. H. Traynor, based out of Detroit. Shanahan’s presentation will show how APA leaders like Traynor and propagandists allied to him formulated a distinctly transnational Anglo-North American form of late-nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism that envisioned subversive (often Irish-origin) Catholic forces on the march in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. That ideology both propelled the APA’s institutional growth in the United States and proved sufficiently flexible to enable its expansion into Canada. However, Shanahan will also show how a brief war scare between the British Empire and the United States in late 1895 over Venezuela’s international boundary line – which raised the prospect of a US invasion of Canada – gravely harmed the APA from without and fractured its cohesion from within.
About the Speaker
Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan is a lecturer in history at Yale University, and an associate research scholar with Yale’s Committee on Canadian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. His research and teaching focuses on North American immigration and citizenship policy, and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. Dr. Shanahan received his BA from McGill University, and his PhD and MA from UC Berkeley, where he was a Hildebrand Fellow and active member of the Canadian Studies Program. He is currently working on a project about transnational nativist, anti-Catholic politics in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Bluma Appel Fund and the Consulate General of Canada in San Francisco.
This event will have a remote attendance option via Zoom. Please select the “virtual attendance” in the RSVP form to receive the link.
If you require an accommodation to participate fully in this event, please let us know with as much advance notice as possible by emailing canada@berkeley.edu. |
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Haitcistut: Heiltsuk- Reconciliation from Below
Friday, March 13 | 1:30 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall
In October 2015, the Heiltsuk Tribal Council released a strategy for implementing a reconciliation agenda, which laid out a distinctive vision for reconciliation with provincial and federal governments.
This public lecture addresses how Heiltsuk have redefined the meaning of reconciliation, negotiated a series of joint land and water management agreements, secured funding for economic, social, and cultural development, and advanced their institutions of self-government.
About the Speaker
Dr. Courtney Jung is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. She works on identity and identity formation at the intersection of comparative politics and contemporary political theory. Her books engage normative debates about liberalism, multiculturalism, and democratic participation, and her previous publications include The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics (2009). Professor Jung received her MA from Columbia University and her PhD from Yale.
This event is organized by the Department of Ethnic Studies with cosponship by the Canadian Studies Program. |
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On the Outside, Looking Out: Canada’s Rural Communities as Stewards of Landscapes and the Land
Wed., March 11 | 4:00 pm PT | Online | RSVP
The uniqueness of Canada’s rural communities is often overlooked, subsuming it under the perceived cultural hegemonies of their local urban centers. This presentation explores Canadian rural cultures to discuss ways that the identities they produce shape Canada’s cultural mosaic and in turn reshape our ongoing relationship with the land. Because the vast majority of Canada’s landscape is rural or remote, we will examine connections between place and culture to understand how this placeness is shaped by Canada’s geography. While most Canadians have at best an arm’s length relationship with the land, we will then address how rural and remote Canadians and their communities, especially those involved in primary industries such as agriculture and forestry, are instead deeply shaped by and in turn shape the land’s future.
Jeff Reichheld is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, focusing on the relationship between Canada’s farming cultures and sustainability. Jeff has taught at Brock University since 2003 and serves on the Board for the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation.
This event is brought to you by the Center for Canadian-American Studies at Western Washington University and the Foundation for WWU & Alumni. |
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Film Screening: “Kill the Documentary”
Wed., Mar. 11 | 7:00 pm | BAMPFA | Tickets
This short film program, curated in tribute to the late filmmaker and critic Jill Godmilow, includes Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s whimsical yet profound Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), which Godmilow provocatively called, “the {most} important film about the Vietnam War, or any war for that matter.” A satirical allegory of 1960s politics, the film follows a group of gerbils who are being held as political prisoners by a cat, and their subsequent heroic escape to Canada where they take up organic farming. It was Wieland’s first film to explicitly engage themes of Canadian nationalism, and reflects her belief that Canada was the world’s last hope for a peaceful utopian society. |
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Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 