I am a white settler professor, academic researcher, teacher, and parent living in Ekwpahak|Fredericton since 2009. I teach in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick, which sits on the unceded and unconquered territory of Wəlastəkokewiyik, a place of relational responsibility governed by the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725-1779. I became Full Professor of Visual Culture here in 2018.

I am currently Principal Investigator of a collaborative 5-year SSHRC Insight Grant, “Unsettling the Settler Artist: Reframing the Canadian Visual Arts” (2016-2021), which explores relational and overlapping colonial histories in the white settler state of Canada using visual and material culture from across Indigenous, Black, racialized diasporic, and white settler positionalities. This project will produce my next edited book, Unsettling Canadian Art History, with McGill-Queen’s University Press in Spring 2022, as well as a second monograph.

My most recent work examines histories of whiteness, feminism, kinship, sexuality, and state making under settler colonialism from the early modern period to the present. Two recent articles on this research include “White Settler Death Drives: Settler Statecraft, White Possession, and Multiple Colonialisms under Treaty 6,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 437-459; and (co-authored with Travis Wysote) “‘The Depth of the Plough’: White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2019): 479-504. I have also examined these concepts and histories in relation to contemporary popular culture, most recently in “Of Folksongs and Feral Children: Taylor Swift’s White Settler Womanhood,” Heliotrope (October 14, 2020).

I am co-editor of Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region. Founded in 1971, historians at the University of New Brunswick established Acadiensis to promote the study of the history of Atlantic Canada in ways that challenged central and periphery models of understanding Canadian history. Building on this legacy, today Acadiensis attends to the history of this place (Mi’kma’ki/Mi’gma’gi, Nitassinan, Nunasiavut, Peskotomuhkati, Wəlastəkwihkok) in relation to the Atlantic world and its global legacies of settler colonialism, enslavement, and capitalism. I welcome inquiries about and submissions to the journal via acadnsis@unb.ca.

I am a former Executive Board member of the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) and currently serve on the editorial board of UAAC’s Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACAR). I currently sit on the Awards to Scholarly Publication Program (ASPP) Publishing Committee with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.