Supervision

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.

To ensure that I am able to commit to meaningful support, I am generally only able to work with a very small number of people at a time. My supervision load is currently full.

Postdoctoral supervision

Current postdoctoral fellows:

• Dr. Jane Komori (PhD, UC Santa Cruz). 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.
  • Find her 2023 Winter session courses in the UBC course schedule!

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.
• Bailey Irene Midori Hoy (MA student). Her research publications include:
  • Bailey Irene Midori Hoy, “‘Joo wa Dare? Who is the Queen?’ Queen Contests during the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese-Americans,” Madison Historical Review 20 (2023): 1-35.

Former graduate students:

• 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.”
• 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

Current Honours students:

• Emma Quan.

Former Honours students:

• 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.”