Programme

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM, updated on March 9, 2026

10.00-12.00 Opening of the Conference & American Keynote
Chair: Mikko Saikku
Room: TBA

“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: TBA
Room: TBA

• “(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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “‘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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “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: TBA  

• “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: Bodies in Crisis?                                                
Chair: Nina Öhman
Room: TBA

• “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)
• “Your body, their choice: private bodies as public property in narratives of medicolegal governance (1907-1937)”
  Mona Raeisian (Marburg University)

16.35-17.35 Movie
Chair: Mikko Saikku
Room: TBA

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 9, 2026

10.00-12.00: Panels 9-12

Panel 9: North America in Literature 
Chair: Tina Parke-Sutherland 
Room: TBA  

• “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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “‘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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “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 (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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “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 17-19

Panel 17: First Nations Issues in Canada    
Chair: Vincent Veerbeek
Room: TBA

• "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: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “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)

16.00-16.15 Coffee Break 

16.15-17.00 Per Kalm Keynote
Chair: Rani Andersson
Room: TBA

“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: TBA

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

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM, updated on March 9, 2026

10.00-12.00 Panels 21-24

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

• “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: TBA

• “‘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: TBA
Room: TBA

• “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: TBA
Room: TBA

• “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)

12.00-13.00 Lunch

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

13.00-14.30: Panels 25-29

Panel 25: Girls & Women as Political Actors                         
Chair: Sonja Salminiitty
Room: TBA

• “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: TBA

• “Christian Nationalism in the Age of Trump: Fact and the Fiction in the Resurgent Narrative” 
  Markku Ruotsila (University of Helsinki)
• “Voter Fraud in Texas: The Discursive Construction of a Strategic Narrative”
  Maxime Chervaux (University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis)
• “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: Food and Gardens: Nourishment from the Land
Chair: TBA
Room: TBA

• “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)

Panel 28: American Connections to the World
Chair: James Schwoch
Room: TBA

• “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 29: The Past and Future of “Crime” in the United States
Chair: Lucia Trimbur
Room: TBA

• “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 30-33

Panel 30: New Challenges under the Trump Administration
Chair: Maxime Chervaux
Room: TBA

• “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 31: The Crises and Promises of California 
Chair: Sonja Salminiitty
Room: TBA

• “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 32: Resisting Displacement                        
Chair: Vincent Veerbeek
Room: TBA

• “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 33: North American Conservatism in a Global Context
Chair: TBA
Room: TBA

• “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: TBA

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

18.00 University of Helsinki Reception 
Location TBA