Friday October 30, 2015 9:00am
Keynote Address:
Dr. Frances Henry
Dr. Frances Henry, Professor Emerita, is one of Canada's leading experts in the study of racism and anti-racism. Since the mid-seventies when she published the first study of attitudes towards people of colour, she has consistently pioneered research in this field. Now retired from York University, Dr. Henry continues an active research and publishing career writing on issues of racism and anti-racism in Canada. The concept of 'democratic racism' developed to explain how and why racism still exists in a democratic society is still been widely used in Canadian scholarship. Her most recent work can be found in a special double edition of Canadian Ethnic Studies featuring preliminary findings of a study on race/racialization in Canadian Universities, of which she is the principal investigator and editor. She and her research team are about to finish a book to be published by the University of British Columbia Press on this ground breaking four year study. Other books include the fourth edition of the Colour of Democracy (Nelson) and Racism in the University: Demanding Social Justice and Inclusion published by the University of Toronto Press.
As an anthropologist, Professor Henry's area of specialization is the Caribbean and she has been particularly interested in African influenced religions in the region and especially in Trinidad and Grenada. Her publications on this subject include He Had the Power: Pa Neezer, the Orisha King of Trinidad, Lexicon Press, 2008; Reclaiming African Religion in Trinidad: The Orisha and Spiritual Baptist Faiths, University of the West Indies Press, 2003.
She has also studied migration patterns from the Caribbean and co-edited a book called Returning to the Source: The Final Stage of the Caribbean Migration Circuit, University of the West Indies Press. 2006. She has also written the only ethnographic study of the Caribbean community in Toronto: The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism published by the University of Toronto Press in 1995.
Professor Henry has been a member of the prestigious Royal Society of Canada since 1989. She serves on its social science selection committee and as well as its standing committee on Diversity. She also continues to be the Canadian delegate to the Inter-American Network of Academies of Science's 'Women for Science' for whom she has conducted research and written several well-received reports.
Saturday October 31, 2015 - 4:00pm
Plenary Panel:
Nationalism in the Contemporary World
Azar Gat
Azar Gat is Ezer Weitzman Professor of National Security in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He took his BA from Haifa University (1978), MA from Tel Aviv University (1983), and DPhil from the University of Oxford (1986). His publications include: The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford UP, 1989); The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 1992); Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (Oxford UP, 1998); and British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists (Macmillan, 2000). The first three books have been reissued in one volume as A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford UP, 2001). His War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006) was named one of the best books of the year by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). His most recent books include: Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How it is still Imperiled (Hoover, 2010); and Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2013). His current book-in-progress is provisionally titled The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace.
Professor Gat has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany (Freiburg, Munich, Constance), a Fulbright Fellow in the USA (Yale), a British Council Scholar in Britain (Oxford), a visiting fellow at the Mershon Center, The Ohio State University, the Goldman Visiting Professor at Georgetown, and the Koret Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen:
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalisation’ and President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). His academic and non-academic writings are wide-ranging and include more than forty books in English and Norwegian, ranging from introductory texts in anthropology to critical essays about happiness, competition, selfishness and waste, as well as two novels. His books Small Places, Large Issues and Ethnicity and Nationalism have been translated into many languages, and the second edition of his Globalization: The Key Concepts was published in 2014. His research has mainly focused on the politics of identity and cultural complexity in contemporary societies, and he has carried out fieldwork in Mauritius, Trinidad and Norway. The monographs Us and Them in Modern Societies and Common Denominators explore the relationship between ethnicity and national identity in complex societies. He is currently leading a team studying local responses to accelerated change (‘overheating’), with a focus on the interrelationships between the economy, the environment and identity, and has in this context recently done fieldwork in an industrial city in Australia. His latest book (2015) is a biography of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth. Professor Eriksen was called on as a witness during the trial of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks and Eriksen has frequently been sought out by Norwegian and international media for his thoughts and analysis on this tragic event.
Aviel Roshwald:
Aviel Roshwald is Professor of History at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. He is the author of The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914-1923 (London: Routledge, 2001). He is also the co-editor, with Richard Stites, of European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
