Fulbright Chair at York to talk about Canada-US relations

York’s Fulbright Chair Nora Faires, a professor of history and gender/women’s studies at Western Michigan University, will discuss Canada-US relations and migration at a public talk on Thursday, April 24.

Right: Nora Faires

Faires’ talk, titled "Freedom Lies Across the River: Meditations on a Monument, Migration, and Canada-US Relations", will take place from 1 to 2:30pm in the History Common Room, 2183 Vari Hall, Keele campus.

A social and cultural historian of migration, Faires studies the intersections of ethnicity, race, gender, class and religion in the US and Canada. Serving as Fulbright Chair at York until May, she is currently working on a new project titled "Gendered Americanism: Constructing National Identities Abroad during the Twentieth Century".

Faires is the co-author of Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650-1990 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the 2006 Albert B. Corey Prize, awarded jointly and biennially by the American Historical Association and Canadian Historical Association for the best book on Canada-US relations or the history of both countries. She also co-authored the award-winning Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land,1855-2005 (Michigan State University Press, 2005), which won a 2006 State History Award from the Historical Society of Michigan and was a finalist for a 2006 Independent Publisher Book Award.

Currently, Faires is writing a chapter for a book along with two essays: "’Talented and Charming Strangers from Across the Line’: Gendered Nationalism, Class Privilege, and the American Woman’s Club of Calgary"; "The Beaver, the Eagle, and Not-So-Foreign Relations: Population Movements between Canada and the United States"; and "Conversion as a ‘Two-Edged Sword’: Evangelicalism among Pittsburgh’s German Immigrants".

With a grant from the Western Michigan University Faculty Research and Creative Activities Support Fund, Faires is writing The Splintered Cross: Religion and Ideology among German Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Pittsburgh. She is also collaborating on a textbook, titled Women and America: An Integrated History and is guest editor for two special issues on borderlands for the Michigan Historical Review to appear in spring and fall of 2008.

Chair of the Western Michigan University’s Canadian studies initiative, Faires has been the Fulbright Chair at York since January.