Keynote speakers

Below you will find information about the keynote speakers for this year's Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference.
Madeline Hsu

“Race and Immigration in the Construction of U.S. Democracy” (U.S. Keynote, Wednesday, May 18)

Madeline Y. Hsu is professor of history and Asian American Studies at UT Austin. Her books include Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000); The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015); and Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016). She co-edited the anthology with Maddalena Marinari and Maria Cristina Garcia, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 (UIP 2019). She is currently one of five co-editors for the Cambridge History of Global Migrations. Please visit her most recent project, which provides curriculum for K-12 classrooms, “Teach Immigration History,” at immigrationhistory.org.

Anne Hyde

“A Deep History of Mixing Blood: Indigenous Strategies and Race Science in North America” (Pehr Kalm Keynote, Thursday, May 19)

Dr. Anne Hyde is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. An expert on the American West and Indigenous histories, she is Editor of the Western Historical Quarterly. She grew up in Reno, Nevada. After getting her BA at Mount Holyoke College and her PhD in from the University of California, Berkeley, she has lived all over the U.S. She has held faculty positions at Louisiana State University, Colorado College, and the University of Oklahoma. Anne Hyde has been elected to the Councils of the American Historical Association, the Western History Association, and served as President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA. Her third book, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West was a Pulitzer Finalist and won the Bancroft Prize. She has also served as Faculty Director of the American Historical Association’s “Tuning the History Discipline in the United States” project. Dr. Hyde’s latest book is Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed Descent Families and the Making of the American West (W. W. Norton, 2022).

L.K. Bertram

"Curse of the Viking? North American White Nationalism and Viking-Age Imagery" (Canadian Keynote, Friday, May 20)

Dr. L.K. Bertram is a curator and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto specializing in histories of migration, colonialism, and gender/ sexuality in the global North. She is the author of The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans (University of Toronto Press, 2020) and is currently working on a new book, "Queen Dollar: The Financial Lives of Sex Workers in the "Wild" West, 1860-1920." Her curatorial practice focuses on bias in social media algorithms and how scholars and academic institutions can better combat misinformation on major image-based platforms like Instagram.