Overview

Although the specific projects vary, I typically work with undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, who are researching topics related to the history of British Columbia or Canada, with a particular emphasis on settler colonialism, empire, Asian Canadian histories, gender, race, identity and/or community.

As a supervisor, I look to offer tailored support designed to respect, grow, and nourish the work that each person is here to do; and, in so doing, to help to foster a collective and sustainable research culture rooted in equity, meaning, accessibility, and care.

My supervision load is currently full and I am not accepting new applicants at this time.

Postdoctoral supervision

Former postdoctoral fellows:

• Dr. Jane Komori (PhD, UC Santa Cruz). Incoming as Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Labor, Migration, and Racial Capitalism in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research publications include:
  • Jane Komori, “The Canadian ‘War of the Two Sugars’: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labour,” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory 31, 2 (May 2023).
  • Jane Komori, “‘Guilt by Association’: Japanese Canadians and the Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 20, 16 (2022): 1-15.
• Dr. Meghan Longstaffe (PhD, University of British Columbia). Her research publications include:
  • Meghan Longstaffe, “Indigenous women as newspaper representations: Violence and action in 1960s Vancouver,” Canadian Historical Review 98, 2 (2017): 230-260. This piece won the 2018 Hilda Neatby Prize from the Canadian Committee in Women’s and Gender History.

Graduate supervision

Current graduate students:

• Nicole Yakashiro (PhD candidate). Her research publications include:
  • Nicole Yakashiro, “‘Powell Street is dead’: Nikkei Loss, Commemoration, and Representations of Place in the Settler Colonial City,” Urban History Review 48, 2 (2021): 32-55.
  • Nicole Yakashiro, “Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914-51,” BC Studies 211 (Autumn 2021): 49-78. This piece won the 2021 BC Studies Prize.

Former graduate students:

• Bailey Irene Midori Hoy, MA. Thesis: “The Stampede Queen and Miss Ghost Town : nationalism, community, and futurity in Japanese Canadian queen pageants, 1943-1953.”
• Georgia Rose Twiss, MA. Thesis: “‘Hail to the Queen of the May!’ Settler Futurity, Childhood, and the May Queens of New Westminster, 1858-1939.”
• Nicole Yakashiro, MA. Thesis: “Daffodils as Property: Settler Colonial Renewal and the Dispossession of Nikkei Farmers in the 1940s.” A revised version of this research was published in BC Studies 211 (Autumn 2021), which won the 2021 BC Studies Prize.
• Dane Allard, MA (co-supervised with Paige Raibmon). Thesis: “Weaving and Baking Nation: The Recognition Politics of the Métis Sash and Bannock in the 1990s.” A revised version of this research was published in Native American and Indigenous Studies 10, 2 (Fall 2023), which won the 2024 NAISA Most Thought-Provoking Article Award.
• Devin Eeg, MA. Thesis: “Race, Labour, and the Architecture of White Jobs: Chinese Labour in British Columbia’s Salmon Canning Industry, 1871-1941.”

Graduate committees

Current graduate dissertation/thesis committees:

• Kyrie Vermette – PhD (Asian Studies), gender, colonialism, and women’s history in Korea, 1884-1945.
• Sarah Fox – PhD (History), “At Home in the Plume: Histories of Unruly Waste and Reckoning in the Pacific Northwest”
• Nila Ayu Utami – PhD (History), “Othering and Belonging: Indigeneity and the Native Stranger in 20th-Century Indonesia”
• Ryan Sun – PhD (History), “Enemy Aliens or Destitute Refugees? Jewish Internment in Hong Kong and Singapore (1936-1941)”

Former graduate dissertation/thesis committees:

• Dr. Henry John, PhD (History), “A War in the Woods? Environmentalisms, Old Growth Forests, and the Labour Movement on Southern Vancouver Island, 1970-1995.”
• Dr. Meghan Longstaffe, PhD (History), “Gendered Precarity and the Politics of Care: Histories of Homelessness, Home, and Community-Making in in Downtown Eastside Vancouver.”
• Haruho Kubota, MA (Educational Studies), “The Stories of Eleven Japanese Canadian Teachers: Colouring Racial Barriers into Teacher Training, Certification, and Hiring Processes in British Columbia, 1916-1942.” This work won the 2021 CAFÉ (Canadian Association of Foundation of Education) Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award.
• Emmett Chan, MA (Asian Studies), “Relearning Religious Practice when Home is Across the Sea: The Case of Tenrikyō.”
• Rosalynd Boxall, MA (History), “The Settler Colonial Paradox of T.C. Douglas and the CCF in Saskatchewan, 1945-1962.”
• Michael Buse, MA (History), “‘The Shrine of their Memory’: Settler Colonialism and the Construction of American Heritage at Metini-Fort Ross, 1845-1906.”

PhD comprehensive exam fields regularly supervised:

• Global histories of empire, (settler) colonialism, and/or decolonization.
• Canadian history.
• History of the North American West.
• British Empire.

Undergraduate supervision

Former Honours students:

• Emma Quan.
• Sara Livingston.
• Laura Moberg, “Writing Respectability: Gender, Race, and Class in the Travel Journal of Susannah Weynton, 1949-1851.”
• Beulah Lee, “Writing Chinese Canadian Resistance: Expressions of Cultural Hybridity, Identity, and Belonging in the Chinatown News, 1953-66.”
• Alice Gorton, “Civilized, Roughly: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Leisure in the Cariboo Gold Rush, 1860-1871.”
  • A revised version of this research was published in BC Studies 200 (Winter 2018-19).
• Anna Gooding, “Policing Women: Clubswomen, Policewomen, and Delinquent Girls in Vancouver, 1910-1930.”
• Catherine Read, “Feminine Futures: Maternal Authority in the Early Years of The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880-1882.”
• Lindsey Moore, “Contested Historical Terrain: A Consideration of the Settler Narratives of Powell River, 1960-2002.”
• Benjamin Lewis, “The Language of British Abolitionism: Evangelicalism and the Middle Class, 1787-1807.”