Graduate Student Profiles The following profiles represent only those students who voluntarily provided information for the website.
My thesis works to understand the role the Vietnam War played in mobilizing gay and lesbian liberationist movements between 1963 and 1975. My research will compare how Vietnam was discussed in periodicals tailored to gay men, versus those for lesbian women, to explore the differences and similarities between how the conflict impacted and ignited gay men versus lesbian or lesbian feminist activism.
My thesis will examine the evolution of commemorating Indigenous historical sites within the city of Saskatoon between 1980 and 2015 to demonstrate how Indigenous activism propelled early commemoration efforts and paved the way for the establishment of commemorative sites resulting from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 94 Calls to Action.
My thesis will investigate sex trafficking and prostitution along the Windsor-Detroit border. My work seeks to understand how fear of the degradation of the ‘family model’ changed how Canada and the United States understood and policed “sexual deviancy” in transnational spaces between 1870 when infrastructure developments and lax border inadvertently expanded opportunities for sexual exploration and the 1930 when both governments intensified their control.
Using primarily children’s correspondence, magazines, and judicial records, this project explores how Western Canadian youth navigated puberty and reproduction during a period when nationalism, the mental hygiene movement, and purveyors of medical quackery fought to shape the values of Canada’s post ‘Great War’ generation of children.
My thesis aims to explore the legal fate of cunning women post-restoration in England. By examining ecclesiastical and secular legal records, I will determine if there was any noticeable change in the number of women who practiced popular magic following the witch trials, in the types of magic they practiced, or how they framed their practices—particularly I want to discover if the church continued to regulate magic practice among the common people following the trials as it had done before.
This project seeks to uncover Indigenous understandings of health and healing as practiced by Nehiyaw (Cree) peoples living in northwest central Saskatchewan from 1921 to the 1970s, with an aim to answer the question: How have understandings of traditional knowledge and cultural practices related to health and healing changed as a result of treaty signing and the colonial practices that followed? This research will use Elders’ narratives and stories to explore traditional healing knowledge and practices as understood before and after treaty signing and will employ an Indigenous research methodology and a community-engaged focus. Research will be conducted in Waterhen Lake First Nation with community members with a storytelling approach meant to ensure I build and maintain strong respectful and reciprocal relationships with Indigenous research participants (Wilson. 2008). I strongly believe that it’s important to validate Indigenous worldviews and perspectives in everything we do, whether in Indigenous or non-Indigenous communities, institutions, and organizations.
My thesis research will investigate the history of two-tier public-private healthcare systems. Analysis of the two-tier South African healthcare system and Canadian Medicare case studies will illustrate the impact that changing effects of health systems have on the delivery of healthcare over time. A focus will be on socio-political and socio-economic factors which influence debates concerning the privatization of healthcare.
This dissertation examines how the Inter Press Service (IPS) became an international ally of Third Worldist nations during the high age of decolonization. The non-profit cooperative of journalists joined transnational efforts challenging international communications structures and, in turn, facilitated the free flow of marginalized perspectives into the global media system. With Third World movements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, IPS played an important role in the decolonization of information and the democratization of world news. Ultimately, my doctoral project aims to unearth how IPS helped expand a planetary Third World imagination in the 1970s and 1980s.
I am a harm reduction activist and doctoral student in History at the University of Saskatchewan, working under the supervision of Dr. Erika Dyck. Informed by my lived experiences, my research examines the social history of harm reduction in festive and psychedelic settings in Marseille and Montréal. Methodologically, I combine participant-observation ethnography, oral history, and community-based archiving to develop collaborative methodologies towards extraction-minimizing research practices. I previously worked as a harm reduction practitioner in France and Québec in both Supervised Consumption Sites and grassroots organizations. I’m research associate with several networks, including HARENE, the French-speaking Interdisciplinary and Community-Based Harm Reduction Research Network. I’m also a teaching assistant (distance learning) in sociology at the Faculté des sciences sociales at Université de Strasbourg, France. Je suis un militant de la réduction des méfaits et doctorant en histoire à University of Saskatchewan sous la direction de Dr. Erika Dyck. Ma recherche doctorale est le fruit de ma trajectoire et s’intéresse à la socio-histoire de la réduction des méfaits dans les milieux festifs et psychédéliques à Marseille et à Montréal. Ma pratique scientifique vise à réduire le caractère extractif de la recherche par des méthodologies collaboratives en mobilisant l’ethnographie par observation participante, l’histoire orale et l’archivistique communautaire. J’ai précédemment travaillé comme intervenant en réduction des méfaits en France et au Québec, tant dans des Services de Consommation Supervisée que dans des organismes communautaires. Je suis chercheur associé à plusieurs réseaux, dont HARENE, le réseau de recherche francophone, interdisciplinaire et communautaire sur la réduction des risques. Je suis également chargé d’enseignement (à distance) en sociologie à la Faculté des sciences sociales de l’Université de Strasbourg en France.
My dissertation research examines the roles of women in Canadian HIV/AIDS activism during the 1980s and 1990s. Considering women’s interlocking roles, experiences, and identities as caretakers, family members, activists, and sufferers during the AIDS crisis, my research aims to expand historical understanding of HIV/AIDS activism in Canada by analyzing how public, medical, activist discourse did (or did not) consider women within their responses to the AIDS epidemic and how, in turn, women fought to gain recognition in broader discussions of HIV/AIDS. Through this analysis, my research situates women’s participation in HIV/AIDS activism into the longer framework of feminist and women’s health activist histories in Canada.
Building upon my BSc in Biomedical Sciences, my research in the history of medicine aims to explore how physicians and pharmaceutical companies in Canada defined “acceptable risk” in relation to the side effects of oral contraceptive pills between 1960 and 1970. My thesis seeks to uncover women’s voices within this discourse, as well as contemporary narratives and opinions surrounding the pill, particularly in the years leading up to its legalization in 1969.
My interests lie in prairie history and applying Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) to prairie history research. My thesis examines how urban municipalities in early Saskatchewan between 1880 and 1920 were a conurbation, or a continuous network of urban communities, through an analysis of how information transmission created and maintained those networks, as well as examining how they impacted the colonial project within Saskatchewan.
My dissertation examines the theme of abstinence through an examination of non-medical intervention and educational campaigns of the twentieth century, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). Examining abstinence education through the lens of social, medical, religious, and gender history complicates temperance history to trace the medicalization of addiction, religious and gendered consequences and roots of abstinence, and the role sobriety played in a person’s identity as the ideal citizen throughout the twentieth century in Canada and the United States.
My research investigates the creation of canola and its establishment in Canadian prairie agricultural production. It focuses on how canola has changed Western Canadians' relationship with the environment and what this means for agriculture in the 21st century.
Fangyu Liu is an MA student in History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on women and gender in modern Chinese history, particularly in the early People's Republic of China. Her thesis examines the All-China Women's Federation's role in mobilizing women's labor and explores the relationship between state policies and women's lived experiences.
Joseph Mays received his MSc in Ethnobotany from the University of Kent researching responses to globalization by the Yanesha of central Peru. Graduating with biology and anthropology degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University, he published a medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve in Ecuador, and he also holds a certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Therapies from Naropa University. After serving as director of the Chacruna Institute's Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative for five years, he became the Program Advisor in 2024, where he continues to partner with Indigenous community organizations throughout Latin America. His current research focuses on the History of Indigenous Movements for Human Rights in the Americas, looking at struggles for community autonomy in the Great Plains, Mexico, and Amazonia. He is interested in how Indigenous political strategies integrate ideas of gift, reciprocity, and relational ontologies reflected in ritual and ceremony, with particular emphasis on their intersection with the psychedelics movement in the Global North.
My dissertation problematizes the dissonance present in the interpretation of the treaty right to health in Saskatchewan. Where Treaty First Nations understand the receipt of medical care to be an extension of their treaty right to health, the Federal government maintains that it holds a moral, but not a legal, obligation to provide medical care. These diverging interpretations of the treaty right to health rest in part on whether one adopts a liberal versus literal reading of the treaty texts. Although legal and scholarly discourse has centered textual interpretations of the numbered treaties, public history within and across Treaty First Nations contend that there is an extra-textual understanding of the medicine chest clause and treaty right to health. My project aims to uncover this understanding and to situate Canada’s health system in the (mis)interpretation and (mis)implementation of this right.
My dissertation is a legal history project studying the origins and ongoing impact of three Canadian Supreme Court cases during the 1970s and 1980s: Murdoch v. Murdoch (1973), Rathwell v. Rathwell (1978), and Pettkus v. Becker (1981). Through applying legal and historical research methods to the study of these three cases, this project investigates how Canadian women’s experiences of property division at the end of marriage and common-law relationships significantly changed, legally and socially, beginning in the 1970s. Combining case law with popular publications like Chatelaine and The Western Producer, I’m interested in understanding how the ending of three relationships in rural, agricultural Canada impacted living, working, and loving under family property law for all Canadians in the latter twentieth century. I’ve co-authored articles on the histories of gendered labour in Canadian academia in the Canadian Historical Review and London School of Economics Impact Blog
My dissertation, “The Deep Water ‘Frontier’: Takoradi Harbour and Timber Extraction in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1940s-1980s,” examines the environmental and social history of Ghana’s timber boom and plywood manufacturing, from the final years of colonial rule through the first decades of independence. I argue that Takoradi Harbour was both a colonial vision of progress and the primary infrastructure for resource extraction, reshaping urban and forest lands, and people’s relationships to them. Tracing networks of capital and labour, I explore how multiple actors, including chiefs, farming communities, timber producers, Syrian and Lebanese merchants, and colonial officials shaped, contested and profited from the timber boom.
My dissertation contributes to gender and medical history by exploring the historical factors that have shaped the lynching and accusations of older women in Ghana. By engaging a wide range of sources like colonial ordinances and missionary and anthropological discourses on witchcraft, this dissertation aims to examine how the historical evolution of the phenomenon has shaped the African understanding of mental diseases that affect older women. I am particularly interested in how witchcraft became a contested system of knowledge within the Ghanaian colonial space and how this has affected its connotations and meanings for contemporary discourses and policy directions on Aging and Population Health in Ghana.
This research explores the structure of Information Order (developed by British historian C.A. Bayly) in the British Malabar District of India (specifically 1800-1890) and explores the position of European planters as one of the major socio-economic groups who effected the production and circulation of regional ecological, climatological, and commercial knowledge. Throughout my research work, my primary aim is to trace the epistemological network related to nature, built and managed by local Malabar landed elites and European planters, and the character of their relationship with the colonial government. This research also aims to examine the development of colonial resource management practices within the British Imperial System, focusing on how information order posed challenges to Britain’s Indian Empire and the strategies employed by local land-based elites, planters, and colonial authority to assess the productive power of Malabar’s natural space
My SSHRC-funded research explores the wide ranging environmental and sociocultural transformations of Saskatchewan’s UNESCO Redberry Lake Biosphere Region. My MA thesis will expand on the work I began in 2024 as an undergraduate student with the Co-Lab: Centre for Community Engaged and Collaborative Research. Tentatively titled “Where Boreal Forest Meets Aspen Parkland: A Long History of the UNESCO Redberry Lake Biosphere Region,” my work will continue to draw on archival, community engaged, and oral history research methods. My approach to history is broadly informed by my Women’s and Gender Studies background, which demonstrated the importance of community, collaboration, and social justice in our research.
My thesis traces the history of the Norman Zepp and Judith Varga Inuit Art collection from its inception in the artist’s hand to its deposition here at the University of Saskatchewan, examining the political, academic, and economic structures which encouraged sale and collection. Between 1982-1992, Zepp travelled to the Arctic to conduct interviews with 43 Inuit artists, and in 2026, I interviewed Zepp about his own career as an art curator, historian and critic. These layered oral histories reveal a network of relationships between artists, art critics, art dealers, and heritage institutions, allowing us to better understand the overlapping phenomenologies which made up the 20th century Inuit art world as these figures negotiated the interpersonal, cultural, aesthetic, and financial meanings of these artworks. This research will provide a key case study that can contribute towards conversations between rights holders and museums as they work toward reconciliation and navigate the ambiguity regarding that appropriate heritage stewardship of Indigenous artworks that were created for 20th century commercial markets yet hold deep historical and cultural significance today.
My thesis seeks to explore the eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic commodity trade, highlighting the lesser know commodities which have been largely overshadowed by the importance of sugar and cotton. Using Historical GIS to focus on the trade of dry ginger between the Caribbean islands and Britain, I will be able to highlight the importance of non-sugar Caribbean commodities in increasing consumption in Britain, and ultimately laying the foundation for the industrial revolution.
My proposed research seeks to look at the work of the first ever Queer Indigenous social activist and wellness group in the United States, Gay American Indians, and where they fit in both in the broad spectrum of North American Indigenous history in their formation, but also where they grow as a national and international organization and effect contemporary Indigenous and Queer politics and the way Academia handles, addresses, reproduces, and includes Queer Indigeneity. I also believe in the importance of recording these stories and histories of Indigenous elders and allies who were involved with GAI to preserve their voices and worldviews for future Indigenous peoples, Queer or otherwise, much as they did with their landmark publication Living the Spirit.
My dissertation research analyses the aftermath of the use of the drug thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s, which resulted in thousands of children born with teratogenic congenital disabilities. The focus of my work is on the changing public perceptions of children born with thalidomide-related congenital disabilities and public trust in the medication. I show that this change was influenced by thalidomide victim activist groups led by both the parents and children affected by the drug. These started as support groups but evolved into activist groups that were instrumental in the agreement of legal settlements with government agencies and pharmaceutical companies. By using media sources published by these groups and correspondence between families and legal agencies, I track the change they made in the eyes of the public regarding their plight for reparations. I work at the intersection of the history of medical experimentation ethics, cultural history, and the history of disability advocacy to frame my research.
Canadian prairie history is interwoven with heroic narratives of ordinary men. Whether the voyageur, the homesteader, the farmer, or the soldier, these white, Christian protagonists become – much like the “cowboy,” the “outlaw,” and the “pioneer” in the American west – a form of national identity in Canada. However, unlike in American stories where the west is often characterized as “wild,” in Canadian stories the west is “mild.” My doctoral research explains how narratives about the “mild west” and the “heroic” characters that populate these stories helped to create Canada’s “peaceful frontier” in the prairie region. These popular understandings of prairie history have provided Canada with powerful, durable, but above all problematic, identity-shaping narratives. My work challenges these settler nation-building identities and narratives found within private memory and public spaces by repositioning them within the context of settler colonialism and Indigenous displacement.
My project seeks to examine the imagery of the goddess Concordia and how it changes during the later Roman Empire from 235-350 CE.
My dissertation explores the complex experiences and work of a group of African medical auxiliaries, namely Local Authority Dressers, from the late 19th to the late 20th century in Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast). It examines how these local participants contributed to advancing the practice of biomedicine and further shaped the culture of care at their health posts. Neither doctors nor nurses, dressers’ work developed into a distinct category among other local intermediary workers. By examining the marginalised roles, agency, and contributions of African auxiliaries, I seek to reinterpret their work as embodying forms of attendant care within Ghana’s biomedical health system rather than as merely precarious, localised labour within a colonial service.
