Programme

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM, updated on March 19, 2026

10.00–12.00 Opening of the Conference & American Keynote
Chair: Mikko Saikku
Room: Small Festive Hall, University Main Building

“MAGA & the ‘Golden Age’ of McKinley”
Charles Postel (San Francisco State 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: Sessions 1–4

Panel 1: Counter-Narratives of Indigeneity, Democracy and Post-Traumatic Healing in American Fiction    
Chair: Janne Lahti
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: History in Action: Racial Covenant Projects in the United States          
Chair: Saara Kekki
Room: Topelia F211

• “Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County”
  Anne Bonds (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
• "Chicago Covenants Project"
  LaDale Winling (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
• "Racial Covenants: The View from Eastern Washington"
  Larry Cebula (Eastern Washington University)

Panel 3: Excavating Memory and Mobility     
Chair: Frederick Wasser
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 4: Ecological Narratives in Writing  
Chair: Lotta Leiwo
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 5–8

Panel 5: Japanese American Resettlement and Return from WWII Incarceration
Chair: Sonja Salminiitty 
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 6: 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 7: Canadian Movements 
Chair: Lotta Leiwo 
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 Faculty of Law)
• “Canada’s Extradition of Nelson Hackett: The First and Last Fugitive Returned to Slavery”
  Michael Pierce (University of Arkansas) 

Panel 8: 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
Chair: 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. 

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM, updated on March 19, 2026

10.00–12.00: Panels 9–12

Panel 9: 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, Hungary)  
• “Huck, Jim, and crises of representation”
  Lynn Domina (Northern Michigan University) 

Panel 10: Visualizing Crises    
Chair: Outi Hakola
Room: Topelia A205

• “Critical Filmmaking in Crisis: The Military-Entertainment Complex and Its Distortion of History through the Cinematic Lense”
  Laura Herges (Heidelberg University)
• “Jerrod Carmichael Lacks Focus”
   Michelle Robinson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• “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 11: 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)
• “Rights and Political Violence: Analyzing Civil Rights Movements in Canada, Northern Ireland, and the United States”
  Kevin McMahon (Trinity College)

Panel 12: 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)
• “Sugar, Elisée Reclus and American Slavery” 
  Frederick Wasser (Brooklyn College, CUNY)
• “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 13– 16

Panel 13: 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 (American Studies Center, University of Warsaw)
• “From dwindling buffalo herds to healthy buffalo herds:  A Species Journey in Alberta, Canada” 
  Nathalie Kermoal (University of Alberta)

Panel 14: North America & Migration Stories
Chair: David Witwer
Room: Topelia A206

• “From sapa to japa: state fragility, soft power, and Nigerian migration to Canada through permanent residency pathways”
  Franklin Aideloje (University Institute of Lisbon)
• “CCP Discursive Strategies and the 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 15: 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 16: 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.–16.00: Panels 17–20

Panel 17: 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 18: Responding to Polycrisis: Political Exit Movements and Imaginaries of the End of the World          
Chair: Pekka Kolehmainen
Room: Topelia A205

• “Responding to Polycrisis: Political Exit Movements and Imaginaries of the End of the World”      
  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 19: Symbolic Lives: Personhood, Power, and the Performance of the American Nation
Chair: Charles Postel
Room: Topelia A132

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

Panel 20: Bodies in Crisis?  
Chair: Nina Öhman 
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)
• “Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum: Effects of Institutionalization” 
  Ann Case (University of Kentucky)

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 (Valles Caldera National Preserve)

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: City Hall (by prior registration only) 

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM, updated on March 19, 2026

10.00–12.00 Panels 21–24

Panel 21: Intangible & Tangible Cultural Heritage in Crisis?  
Chair: Anne Brixius
Room: Topelia A206

• “South East Woodland American Indian Designs & Body Decoration”
  Jamie Oxendine (Black Swamp Intertribal Foundation)
• “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)

Panel 22: 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 23: Power and Public Reactions  
Chair: Rani-Henrik Andersson 
Room: Topelia F211 

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

Panel 24: Native American boarding schools
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)

12.–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 25–28

Panel 25: 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 26: 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 27: 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 (North American Studies, University of Helsinki; School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University)
• “A long transition to peace: congress and the forging of foreign policy of non-entanglement, 1919–1925” 
  Joel Nyman (University of Jyväskylä)
• “Pacific Contact: How an Economic Crisis Propelled the American Nation Forward” 
  Andres Resendez (University of California, Davis)

Panel 28: The Past and Future of “Crime” in the United States
Chair: Lucia Trimbur
Room: Topelia F211

• “The Luigi Mangione case as the terrorism of the future and the future of terrorism” 
  Zoe Savitsky (Osgoode Hall Law School)
• “‘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 29–32

Panel 29: 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)
• “Snapshots of a Culture of Spite in the Age of Trump” 
  Marianne Kongerslev (Aalborg University)

Panel 30: 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 31: 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 32: 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” 
  Pekka Kohlemainen (University of Turku)

16.30–17.30 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: Main Building Agora