Speaker Series: Why Canada Matters - guest speaker Dr. Andrea Geiger, Prof Emerita Simon Fraser University

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and the author of (Yale University Press, 2011), awarded both the Theodore Saloutos Book Award (Immigration and Ethnic History Society) and the Association of Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her most recent book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867-1945, was co-published in 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press (David J. Webber Series in the New Borderlands History) and, in Canada, by UBC Press.

Dr. Geiger's talk will focus on her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, which examines the role of the North Pacific borderlands along the northernmost stretches of U.S.-Canada border that divide Alaska from the Yukon and British Columbia, as well as those that follow the contours of the B.C. and Alaska coast, in the construction of race and citizenship in both the United States and Canada. She will speak to the intersecting nature of the race-based legal constraints imposed by Canada and the United States on Japanese immigrants and Indigenous people in this borderlands region, arguing for the importance of giving Canada an equal place in our studies of both transpacific and borderlands history.