Charles Postel's research focuses on social movements, including the farmer-labor Populists of the 1890s, and right-wing and conservative movements from the McKinley campaign of 1896 to the Tea Party and Maga movements of the twenty-first century. Prof. Postel received a PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a professor of history at San Francisco State University. He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg; a Fulbright research chair at the Roosevelt Institute of American Studies in the Netherlands; a fellow at the Stanford University Humanities Center; and he is presently a visiting researcher with the Hub on Emotions, Polarisation, and Populism at the University of Helsinki. Prof. Postel is the author of The Populist Vision, and Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896, and is working on a book on the Black experience in the World War II era.
Jennifer Andrews completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in English, with a SSHRC-funded dissertation on comparative English-Canadian and American literature in 1998. She held a Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Arizona, along with a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship at the same institution before joining the University of New Brunswick as an Assistant Professor in 1999. Over the course of her career, she has published three monographs and numerous articles and book chapters. Jennifer served as the co-editor of Studies in Canadian Literature for a decade and was the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English from 2018 to 2020. In 2022, she moved to Halifax to take up the role of Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and as a Professor of English at Dalhousie University. Her keynote talk is an exploration of her latest book, Canada Through American Eyes. The monograph and talk will explore how Canada is imagined primarily by US writers, and what readers and scholars on both sides of the Canada-US border can learn from these recent depictions by examining a selection of US-authored fiction from 9/11 to the present. The novels — and occasionally paintings, films, and musicals — that are the subject of the book provide a deliberately varied set of case studies to probe how US texts, along with works of art produced on both sides of the Canada-US border, uncover moments in Canadian historical and literary studies that have been buried or occluded to protect Canada's self-representation as an exceptional nation.
Environmental historian Adam Dean will explain the origin of the national park idea in the United States, highlighting new scholarship and key moments in the story of parks. He will also discuss the state of the park service today, offering unique perspective on indigenous co-stewardship, ecological restoration, and the place of parks in a culturally divided society.
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Adam Dean earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in environmental history at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the National Park Service at Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico, he was associate professor of history and department chair at Lynchburg College, a small liberal-arts school in Virginia. Publications include a 2015 book on the establishment of Yosemite and Yellowstone as well as articles on 19th-century American history. He has two forthcoming articles in 2026. The first is "'Becoming a Part of the Land,' Hemish Indigenous Stewardship in the American Southwest" and the second is a biographical piece on Andrew Johnson, coming out in an Oxford University Press edited collection. His current project investigates the predatory wolf attacks in Turku, Finland as an indicator of global environmental change. With the park service, Dean has created educational programming for a wide range of ages, worked on public history projects, participated in wildland fire assignments and public education, as well as engaged in tribal relations.