Programme

PROGRAM (updated: May 12, 2026)

9:00 am Registration Desk opens inside Topelia A Building. The desk is located between A100 and A111 (Topelia Common Room).  

10.00–12.00 Opening of the Conference & American Keynote 
Chair: Mikko Saikku 
Room:  (F4050), University Main Building

Opening words 
Conference President 
Mikko Saikku  

Chancellor’s greetings
Chancellor Kaarlo Hämeri 

Canadian Embassy Greetings
Ambassador of Canada to the Republic of Finland Patrick Hébert

US Embassy Greeting 
Chargé d’Affaires J. Chris Karber 

American keynote, MAGA & the ‘Golden Age’ of McKinley 
Professor Charles Postel (San Francisco State University) 
278 Years of North American Studies: Reminiscences of an Old Timer

Professor Emeritus Markku Henriksson 
 

12.00–13.00 Lunch 
Topelia UniCafe, Unioninkatu 38. UniCafe is located within the D-building of the Topelia complex. 

 
13.00–14.30: Panels 1–3 
 
Panel 1: Counter-Narratives of Indigeneity, Democracy and Post-Traumatic Healing in American Fiction  
Chair: Lotta Leiwo 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “(Counter-)Imaginaries of Democracy in William Gibson’s Agency (2020)” 
  Esko Suoranta (University of Helsinki)
• “‘The Man Who Had Become Invisible’: Counter-Narrating the Traumatic Loss of Self in Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love” 
  Howard Sklar (University of Helsinki)
• “Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God as Counter Narrative” 
  Mark Shackleton (University of Helsinki) 

Panel 2: Excavating Memory and Mobility            
Chair: Justin Vaughn 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Excavating a Dissertation: Reflections on Completing the Work of a Late Colleague” 
  Sean Dinces (Long Beach City College)
• “What Good is Genealogy?” 
  Elliott  Gorn (Loyola University Chicago)
• “Mobility and Transcultural Memory in Atticus Lish's Preparation for the Next Life”  
  Ari Räisänen (University of Eastern Finland) 

Panel 3: Ecological Narratives in Writing   
Chair: Mimi White 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “‘What Is Found There’: Poetry's Role in Environmental Legislation--A Case Study of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Yosemite Grant of 1864” 
  Barbara Mossberg (University of Oregon)
• “Reimagining crisis: ecological and imaginative narratives in contemporary Canadian eco-stories” 
  Şeyma Yonar (University of Graz)
• “Not so Perfect Landscapes: JB Jackson’s Symbolic Absences” 
  Richard Schein (University of Kentucky) 

14.30–15.00 Coffee Break 

15.00–16.30: Panels 4–7 

Panel 4: Japanese American Resettlement and Return from WWII Incarceration 
Chair: Patrick Miller 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “Remaking Japanese America: Resettlement in Chicago from Incarceration during WWII”  
  Meredith Oda (University of Nevada, Reno)
• “The Experience of Hawai’ian Japanese Americans in the Incarceration Story” 
  Saara Kekki (University of Helsinki)
• “Japanese American displacement and the creation of the postwar suburbs” 
  Megan Asaka (University of California, Riverside) 

Panel 5: Land Loss and the Destruction of Concepts of Common Usage of Land as an Accumulated Crisis for Indigenous People in North America      
Chair: Menja Holtz 
Room: Topelia F211 

• “Landscapes of Kinship and Power: The Making and Remaking of Kanien:ke” 
  James Paxton (Moravian University)
• “Land loss and the Common subsistence patterns and land loss in the Lenape-Moravian mission of Fairfield, 1792–1857”                      
  Menja Holtz (Technische Universität Braunschweig)
• “‘Is It Marked in the Bible’: Anishinaabeg negotiations, contestations, and claims in the Bawating Borderlands”          
  Karl Hele (Mount Allison University) 

Panel 6: Canadian Movements 
Chair: Nina Öhman 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Quebec Economic Immigration Policy and Scarcity of Medical Doctors: Major obstacles and breakthroughs”   
  Achyut Adhhikari (Ciusss, West Central Montreal, University of the Philippines National College of Public Administration and Governance)
• “Climate Migration in Canada: Facilitating New Pathways for Resettlement and Migration Governance”  
  Kamaal Zaidi (University of Calgary)
• “Canada’s Extradition of Nelson Hackett: The First and Last Fugitive Returned to Slavery” Michael Pierce (University of Arkansas) 

Panel 7: Food and Gardens: Nourishment from the Land 
Chair: Verna Holvi 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “Together at the Table: Food, Song, and the Art of Repair in Times of Crisis” 
  Kristina Jacobsen (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; University of New Mexico)
• “Gardens as Radical Spaces: The Agrarian Visions of Wendell Berry and bell hooks”             
  Robert Brinkmeyer (University of South Carolina)
• “The river, the beet, the people: Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red” 
  Tina Parke-Sutherland (Stephens College) 

16.35–17.35 Movie 

Introduction: Mikko Saikku 
Room: Topelia F211 

Movie Panelists: Frances Karttunen, Barbara White, Mark White  
Movie showing: “Nantucket’s Historic Coloured Cemetery: Stories Told By Nantucketers” 

18.00 Conference dinner 

, Katajanokanlaituri 2 A, 00160 Helsinki. Please be on time for the conference dinner.  

PROGRAM (updated: May 12, 2026)

9:00 am Registration Desk opens inside Topelia A Building. The desk is located between A100 and A111 (Topelia Common Room).  
 
10.00–12.00: Panels 8-11 
 
Panel 8: North America in Literature 
Chair: Tina Parke-Sutherland 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “Extractivism, Indigenous Environmental Spaces, and The Crisis of the American Dream in Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017)” 
  Hamid Masfour (Sultan Moulay Slimane University)
• “(An)Other Western story: Jordan Abel’s poetry book Injun and an unsettling of settler colonial literary formulas”           
  Kristina Aurylaite (Vytautas Magnus University)
• “Crisis and embodiment in Shashi Bhat’s short fiction”  
  Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka (University of Debrecen)
• “Huck, Jim, and crises of representation”  
  Lynn Domina (Northern Michigan University)

Panel 9: Visualizing Crises
Chair: Outi Hakola 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Critical Filmmaking in Crisis: The Military-Entertainment Complex and Its Distortion of History through the Cinematic Lense” 
  Laura Herges (Heidelberg University)
• “Short Films, Shared Futures: Wapikoni mobile and the Democratic Power of Indigenous Cinema in Québec” 
  Viktoria Sophie Lühr (Ecole Des Hautes Études En Sciences Sociales)
• “Seeing Ourselves”: News Photography and Feminist and LGBTQ Struggles for Bodily Autonomy, 1965–2000” 
  Carol Quirke (SUNY Old Westbury) 

Panel 10: The Role of Race in Crises in North America 
Chair: Lucia Trimbur 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “‘If You Fight Them, You Will Win’: Race, Ethnicity, Democracy, Longevity in the 1992 Quincentennial, and the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2025”  
  John Moe (Ohio State University)
• “‘The Americanizing Door’: African-Americans and Scandinavian Immigrants on Chicago’s South Side”      
  Tisha Ulmer (Kingsborough Community College)
• “Octavia Butler and the Crisis of Racial Justice: Oppression and Reparation in Xenogenesis”           
  Debra Rae (Cohen University of South Carolina) 

Panel 11: The State of the American South                                    
Chair: Mikko Saikku 
Room: Topelia F211 

• “Not Yankees: The American South as a Survival Culture” 
  Lawrence McDonnell (Iowa State University)
• “Towards a miscible past: history and ecology in the waterways of the Deep South” 
  Mark Hersey (Mississippi State University)
• “‘Here we were born, and here we will die’ – Black Abolitionists against Colonization Plans in antebellum America”     
  Oskari Ropponen (University of Eastern Finland) 

12.00–13.00 Lunch 
Lunch at Topelia UniCafe, Unioninkatu 38. UniCafe is located within the D-building of the Topelia complex. 

13.00–14.30: Panels 12-15 
 
Panel 12: Ecoexpansive Kinship and Multispecies Political Actors  
Chair: Niko Vanhala 
Room: Topelia F211        

• “Reindeer as an unforeseen solution to food crises in Alaska in the 1890s”  
  Meeri Kataja (Montana State University)
• “The bison speaks: the American bison as a multispecies political actor in ecological and governance crises”  
  Ida Szaciło (University of Warsaw)
• “From dwindling buffalo herds to healthy buffalo herds: A Species Journey in Alberta, Canada”  
  Nathalie Kermoal (University of Alberta) 

Panel 13: North America & Migration Stories 
Chair: David Witwer 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Discursive Strategies of the CCP's Agents and Their Reframing of Anti-Chinese Sentiment in Canadian Multiculturalism”       
  Yu-Chen Chen (York University)
• “Words are at war with me”. “Or, Reflections on Censorship, Migration and In-Betweenness in the United States”  
  Alejandro Arizmendy Méndez (Università Ca' Foscari) 

Panel 14: FASA Presents: The Far-Reaching Impacts of Settler Colonialism 
Chair: Janne Lahti 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “From Dreams to Disillusionment: Finnish Women’s Socialist Rhetoric and Settler Colonial Narratives”          
  Lotta Leiwo (University of Helsinki)
• “Analyzing settler colonialism through American interest groups in the Hawaiian Islands (1887–1898)”   
  Henri Keskinen (University of Turku)
• “A Rhetorical-Policy Analysis of Green Colonialism and the Politics of Green Governance in Alaska and Northern Canada”            
  Ibrahim Berrada and Stefanie Kunze (Northern Arizona University) 

Panel 15: North American Involvement during the World Wars                  
Chair: Lawrence McDonnell 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “The Village of Graignes, Normandy, 6 June to 16 June, 1944: The Existential Crisis”  
  Stephen Rabe (University of Texas at Dallas)
• “That the maple leaf might live: remembering death in the First World War” 
  Jennifer Bass (independent scholar)
• “Challenging America's Isolationism”  
  Robert Anzenberger (University of Kentucky) 

14.30–16.00: Panels 16-18 
 
Panel 16: First Nations Issues in Canada     
Chair: Vincent Veerbeek 
Room: Topelia F211 

• “Civil Disturbances, Near Misses, Conspiracies, and Threatened Invasions in the Sault Ste. Marie Borderlands, 1814–1870” 
  Karl Hele (Mount Allison University)
• “Narrating a Nation. Nation-building narratives and narrative activism of the Canadian Métis.”  
  Verna Holvi (University of Helsinki)
• “Listening to a Burning Land: Climate Grief and Indigenous Knowledge in Interior British Columbia”  
  Radhika Tabrez (Thompson Rivers University) 

Panel 17: Responding to Polycrisis: Political Exit Movements and Imaginaries of the End of the World  
Chair: Pekka Kolehmainen 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “Becoming More Fabulous Together’: The Queer Politics of Radical Faeries”  
  Mila Seppälä (University of Turku)
• “‘There is no alternative’: post-left and the crisis of radical imagination”  
  Jaakko Dickman (John Morton Center for North American Studies)
• “The Militia Movement and the Meanings of Societal Collapse” 
  Niko Heikkilä (John Morton Center for North American Studies) 

Panel 18: Symbolic Lives: Personhood, Power, and the Performance of the American Nation 
Chair: Charles Postel 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “Longevity and Loss: the Centenarian Fantasy in the Progressive Era Imagination”  
  Boyd Cothran (York University)
• “Stranger than Fiction: the Remarkable True Story of ‘Centenarian’ Justiniano Roxas” 
  Martin Rizzo-Martinez (University of California Santa Cruz)
• “Symbolic Lives and Settler Legacies: The Reimagined History of Rose Daniels” 
  Erika Bsumek (University of Texas at Austin) 

16.00–16.15 
Coffee Break  

16.15–17.00 Per Kalm Keynote 
Chair: Rani Andersson 
Room: Topelia F211 
 
“National Parks in America: The Past, Present, and Future” 
Adam Dean (Independent Scholar) 

17.00–17.45 Music Performance Panel          
Chair: Elliott Gorn  
Room: Topelia F211 

“Pete Seeger and American Reform”    
Allan Winkler, Miami University of Ohio 

18.00 Helsinki City Reception 
Location  (by prior registration only) 

PROGRAM (updated: May 12, 2026)

9:00 am Registration Desk opens inside Topelia A Building. The desk is located between A100 and A111 (Topelia Common Room).  

10.00-12.00 Panels 19–22 
 
Panel 19: Intangible & Tangible Cultural Heritage in Crisis?   
Chair: Anne Brixius 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Ellen White’s solution to the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s healthcare crisis in The Ministry of Healing (1905)” 
  Auli Saarsalmi-Paalasmaa (University of Helsinki)
• “Under fire but fighting back: how museums and national parks are dealing with the Trump administration's funding cuts and curatorial interference” Sonja Salminiitty (University of Helsinki)
• “The Crisis of Free Speech in U.S. Comedy”             
  Tuula Kolehmainen (Tampere University/University of Turku) 

Panel 20: Canada and the World 
Chair: Joshua Wilson 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “‘No more hemispheres to cut in two’: The Panama Canal and Canadian futures in a Pacific World”  
  Paula Hastings (University of Toronto)
• “Voices «de l’extérieur». Reflections on le Congrès mondial acadien and center-periphery relations” 
  Christina Keppie (Western Washington University)
• “‘Two halves of an apple’: the Heritage Minute, Birthright Israel, and the crisis of the settler nation” 
  Soili Smith (Mount Allison University)
• “QAnon in Québec: from Alexis Cossette-Trudel to Éric Duhaime”       
  Alexandre Turgeon (Université Laval) 

Panel 21: Power and Public Reactions   
Chair: Rani-Henrik Andersson 
Room: Topelia F211 

• “Scraping Bottom: Assessing America's Worst Presidents”           
  Justin Vaughn (Coastal Carolina University)
• “The U.S. Supreme Court and Presidential Power”  
  Mark Miller (Independent Scholar) 

Panel 22: Racialized Spaces of Control: Indigenous Boarding Schools and Racial Covenants
Chair: Verna Holvi          
Room: Topelia A132 

• “Marching to Their Own Drum: Marching Bands at Government Boarding Schools and Identity Formation among Native American Musicians, 1880-1940”
  Vincent Veerbeek (University of Helsinki)
• “To excite the curiosity of strangers”: transformation of spaces through cultural voyeurism in Michigan Indigenous residential schools       
  Lindsay Elizabeth Doran (University of Eastern Finland)
• “Racial Covenants: The View from Eastern Washington” 
  Larry Cebula (Eastern Washington University)  

12.00–13.00 Lunch 
Lunch at Topelia UniCafe, Unioninkatu 38. UniCafe is located within the D-building of the Topelia complex. 

13.00–14.30: Panels 23–26 

Panel 23: Girls & Women as Political Actors                                
Chair: Sonja Salminiitty 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “The Women's Affairs Section - German and American Women Re-Doing Democracy”             
  Anne Brixius (University of Helsinki Alumni)
• “Indigenous Citizenship, Crisis, and the Supreme Court: From Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl to Haaland v. Brackeen and Beyond”                    
  Elizabeth Rule (American University)
• “‘Ruin, ruin, ruin: my life is gone to ruin’: financial, social, and sexual destruction in early 1900s romance novels”                                          
  Jane Weiss (City University of New York - Kingsborough CC) 

Panel 24: American Democracy at Home in Crisis?       
Chair: Mikko Saikku 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Christian Nationalism in the Age of Trump: Fact and the Fiction in the Resurgent Narrative”  
  Markku Ruotsila (University of Helsinki)
• “Trump Country 2.0: The Continued Role of Rural Voters in Alabama and Georgia”  
  Scott Buchanan (Georgia College and State University) and Bruce L. Blair (University of Alabama) 

Panel 25: American Connections to the World 
Chair: James Schwoch 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “The Western edge of the Eastern crisis: Turkish officers, Russian pirates and British smugglers in post-reconstruction America, 1877–1878.”   
  Keith Brown (University of Helsinki; Arizona State University)
• “Pacific Contact: How an Economic Crisis Propelled the American Nation Forward”  
  Andres Resendez (University of California, Davis) 

Panel 26: The Past and Future of “Crime” in the United States 
Chair: Lucia Trimbur 
Room: Topelia F211 

• “‘Do you think Jimmy Hoffa is buried in my backyard?’: The Continuing Search for America’s Most Notorious Union Leader”      
  David Witwer (Penn State University)
• “The Catastrophic Homecoming of Agent Miss Bonney” 
  Henry Oinas-Kukkonen (University of Oulu) 

14.30–16.00: Panels 27–30 

Panel 27: New Challenges under the Trump Administration 
Chair:  Mark Hersey 
Room: Topelia F211 

• “Synthetic Communication: Use of Deepfakes in the Trump Administration” 
  Outi Hakola (University of Eastern Finland)
• “Economic Crisis under the Trump Administration: A Historical Perspective”  
  Welf Werner (Universität Heidelberg) 

Panel 28: The Crises and Promises of California  
Chair: Sonja Salminiitty 
Room: Topelia A132 

• “The Crisis of California in American Religious Thought”  
  Philip Deslippe (Independent Scholar)
• “Challenging Erasure: Illumination of the African American Experience in Shaping Southern California Living during the Jim Crow Era and Beyond”  
  Alison Rose Jefferson (Independent Historian and Heritage Conservation Consultant)
• “Respectability in crisis: Middle-class consumption standards and the California gold rush” 
  Niko Vanhala (University of Helsinki) 

Panel 29: Resisting Displacement                               
Chair: Vincent Veerbeek 
Room: Topelia A205 

• “Wolf Chief, the ‘Irrepressible Letter Writer’: Native American Activism through Correspondence in the Early Reservation Years” 
  Justin Gage (University of Arkansas)
• “Maintaining Relations with x̌ʷəlč (Whulge) through the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott” 
  Josh Reid (University of Washington)
• “Remembering Historical Trauma in an Age of Forgetting: The Haudenosaunee and Revolutionary War Commemorations”            
  Scott M. Stevens (Syracuse University) 

Panel 30: North American Conservatism in a Global Context 
Chair: Gene Zubovich 
Room: Topelia A206 

• “Inventing the Global Culture Wars: Evangelicals, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Problem of Russian Manhood after the Cold War”  
  Gene Zubovich (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
• “The First Amendment as a First Step: Adversarial Legalism and the Building of International Conservative Networks”  
  Joshua Wilson (University of Denver)
• “Escaping the Longhouse”: Rhetoric of a Crisis in the Dissident Right  
  Pekka Kolehmainen (University of Turku)  

16.00–16.45 Reception by the Canadian Embassy 
Room: Topelia F211 

16.45–17.45 Canadian Keynote & Conference Closing  
Chair: Saara Kekki         
Room: Topelia F211 

 “Canada Through American Eyes” 
Jennifer Andrews (Dalhousie University) 

18.00 University of Helsinki Reception 
Location: