Robarts Centre hosts book talk featuring Jatinder Mann

York University’s Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies will present a talk featuring Jatinder Mann and his new book, “The Search For a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s”, on Thursday, June 1.

The event takes place at 7pm in Kaneff Tower, room 626, and is free to attend.

Mann, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, will discuss his new book that explores the profound social, cultural, and political changes that affected the way in which Canadians and Australians defined themselves as a “people” from the late 19th century to the 1970s. It asks a key historical question: Why and how did multiculturalism replace Britishness as the defining idea of community for English-speaking Canada and Australia, and what does this say about their respective experiences of nationalism in the twentieth century?

Mann is a former Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. He is currently working on a project on ‘The end of the British World and the redefinition of citizenship in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, 1950s-1970s’. He has also published numerous articles in front-ranking, interdisciplinary journals.

Mann has held visiting fellowships and professorships at the Australian National University, Carleton University, and the Victoria University of Wellington. He was awarded his doctorate in history at the University of Sydney in 2011. He was also a recipient of the prestigious Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship by the Australian government and an International Postgraduate Award by the University of Sydney for his doctoral research.