Paula Hastings

Biography

Paula Hastings received her Ph.D. in History from Duke University.  She is currently Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC and in the Tri-Campus Graduate Program at the University of Toronto.

Her research and teaching center on the imperial and global contexts of Canada’s political, social and cultural histories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  She is interested, more specifically, in Canada’s evolving relationship with Britain and the Caribbean since Confederation and in the histories of imperialism/colonialism, race, migration, and nationalism. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dreams of a Tropical Canada: Race, Empire, and Canadian aspirations in the Caribbean Basin, 1870-1966, and is conducting research on a second book-length project, tentatively titled Reorienting the Map around the Pacific: The Panama Canal and Shifting Spatial Imaginaries in Twentieth Century Canada.

Her publications include “Territorial Spoils, Transnational Black Resistance, and Canada’s Evolving Autonomy during the First World War,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 47:94 (June 2014), 443-470; “Empire, Continent, and Transnationalism in Canadian History: Essays in Honor of John Herd Thompson,” with Jacob A.C. Remes, American Review of Canadian Studies 45, 1 (Spring 2015), 1-7; “Rounding off the Confederation: Geopolitics, tropicality, and Canada’s ‘destiny’ in the West Indies in the early twentieth century,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13:2 (August 2013); “Fellow British Subjects or Colonial ‘Others’?  Race, Empire, and Ambivalence in Canadian Representations of India in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Review of Canadian Studies 38:1 (Spring 2008), 3-24; “Branding Canada: Consumer Culture and the Development of Popular Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century,” in eds. Adam Chapnick and Norman Hillmer, Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Twentieth-Century Canadian Nationalisms (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 134-158; “’Our Glorious Anglo-Saxon Race Shall Ever Fill Earth’s Highest Place’: The Anglo-Saxon and the Construction of Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada,” in eds. Phillip Buckner and Doug Francis, Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, November 2006), 92-110; and a forthcoming book chapter “The limits of ‘brotherly love’: Rethinking Canada-Caribbean relations in the early twentieth century,” in eds., Laura Madokoro, Francine Mackenzie and David Meren, Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada's International History (forthcoming 2016, UBC Press).

Her article “Territorial Spoils, Transnational Black Resistance, and Canada’s Evolving Automony during the First World War” received the Social Historie/Histoire Sociale best article prize in 2015, and her doctoral thesis received the biennial Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States (2011).  Her research has been awarded funding from the Connaught Fund at the University of Toronto (2014-2015), SSHRC (2011-2013; 2004-2008; 2003-2004); the American Council of Learned Societies (2009-2010); the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2009-2010; 2008); the Australian Historical Association (2009); the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (2008-2009); the International Council for Canadian Studies (2009); the London Goodenough Association of Canada (2007-2008); Universities U.K. (2004-2005); and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program (2004-2005).

Education

Ph.D. Duke University
M.A. Carleton University

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate

HISA05: Themes in World History II: Imperialism in the Modern World (W 2014)

HISB40: Early Canada and the Atlantic World (F 2013, F 2014)

HISB41: Making of Modern Canada (W 2016, F 2016)

HISC46: Canada and the World (W 2013, W 2015, F 2015)

HISC70: The Caribbean Diaspora (W 2014, F 2015)

HISD45: Canadian Settler Colonialism in Comparative Context (W 2013, F 2013)

HISD48: The World Through Canadian Eyes (W 2016, W 2017)

Graduate

HIS1128: Canada and Transnational History (W 2015)

HIS1117: Canada: Colonialism/Post Colonialism (F 2016)

Research Interests

• Imperialism/colonialism
• Nationalism
• Migration
• British Empire
• Canada
• Caribbean