Chair: Saara Kekki
Ernesto Dominguez Lopez – “Race, class, crisis, and right-wing populism in the 21st century United States”
Zsuzsanna Lenart-Muzka – “Against the Disfigurement of Black Girlhood: Rebellious Teenagers in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Téa Mutonji’s Shut Up You’re Pretty”
Ari Räisänen – “War at the End of Empire: Structures of State Violence in Matt Gallagher’s Empire City”
Inna Sukhenko – “Profiling Solastalgia in U.S. Nuclear Fictional Writings”
Coyote Shook – “St. Adjutor of Vernon, Florida”
Eileen Chung – “De-Centering the United States in Asian American Studies”
Chair: Mikko Saikku
Scott Buchanan – “Woodrow Wilson and the American Presidency”
Thomas Cobb – “Militarism or populism? Defining the Jacksonian school of foreign policy after Trump”
Ibrahim Berrada & Paul Coleman – “Populism and Education: A Canadian-American Case Study”
Chair: Mark Hersey
Lawrence McDonnell & Kathleen Hilliard – “Vanishing Matilda: Getting Away with Murder in the Old South”
Atte Arffman & Antero Holmila – “Race, Environment and Crisis: Hurricane Camille and the Politics of Southern Segregation”
Brian Dempsey & Will Jacks – “An Island of Trees Called Old Hickory: History and Memory in the Mississippi Delta.”
Chair: Nina Öhman
Jari Käkelä – “The Various Apparitions of Tom Joad: From Meditations on Social Justice to Rage Against the Erosion of the American Dream”
Howard Sklar – “Shared Grief and Collective Outrage in Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”
Bent Sørensen – “Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs as a Re-negotiation of Protest Songs and US History”
Madeline Hsu - Race and Immigration in the Construction of U.S. Democracy
Chair: Saara Kekki
Victor Monnin – “State Geologist and Bystander to Genocide: William H. Brewer’s Fieldtrip Across California and the Destruction of Native Californians (1860-1864)”
Sababa Monjur – ““You Were Made To Be Workers and Test Subjects:” Reconstruction of Agency and Identity in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu”
Wilma Andersson – “Notions of Mental Illness and Idiocy in Maxine Hong Kingston’s "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts" (1976)”
Jane Weiss – ““Try Again”: Political Engagement in the Lowell Offering”
Angela Silver – Agents of Inscription: Women's Writing as Counter Monument at Place des Montréalaises”
Adam Arenson – “Crossing the Border after the Underground Railroad: The Emancipation Generation of African North Americans in the United States and Canada, 1860s-1930s”
Chair: Cheryl Greenberg
Roger Nichols – “Changing Memories: Murderous Tom Quick and the Dakota Sioux Hangings”
Dave Tell – “Of Race and Rivers: Emmett Till, Topography, and Memory”
Dirk van Rens – ““In Another Country They Would Have Been Criminals, but This Was America”: Narrative Strategies and the Trauma of Slavery in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing”
Chair: Reetta Humalajoki
Jeffrey Utzinger – “The Forest “Appeared Alive with its Sons and Daughters”: Commodification of the Indian Body in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”
Susan Gray – “Indigenous Resistance, the Benevolent, Empire, and Federal Indian Policy: The Case of the Twinsburg Institute”
Vincent Veerbeek – “Marching Bands and the Evolution of Musical Networks at United States Off-Reservation Boarding Schools, 1879-1961”
Chair: Auli Saarsalmi-Paalasmaa
Bo Pettersson – “American “Housewife Writers” as Precursors of Second Wave Feminism”
Aušra Paulauskienė – “How Catholic Is Freeman's "A New England Nun"?”
Aino Kirjonen – “Crossing Boundaries and Upholding Respectability: Female Students and Strategies of Resistance in American Higher Education in Turn of the 20th Century”
Chair: Nina Öhman
Ray Allen – “Transnational Connections: Harlem Calypso and Brooklyn Soca”
Paul Spickard – “The Bronze Buckaroo and the Chinese Nightingale: Herb Jeffries, Shirley Yamaguchi, and Shape Shifting Racial Identities”
Balazs Venkovits – “Immigration to North America in the 1920s: Changing Perceptions of Canada in Hungary”
Nina Öhman – "The enduring influence of Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music in Finland"
Chair: Scott Buchanan
Alan Draper – “What the 2020 Election Tells Us—Warns Us—to Expect in the Approaching 2022 Congressional Elections”
Robert Mason – “Discovering the “gender gap”: Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and electoral politics in 1968”
Mark Miller – State Attorneys General and their Political Lawsuits Against the Federal Government
Chair: Janne Lahti
Sonja Salminiitty – “'Represent Us': A Sustainable Partnership Model for Indigenous Communities and Museums”
Mark Swiney – “Gilcrease Museum and Native American Indians Graves Protection”
Mark Brandon – “The Safest Guide and Savior: Science, Morality and Race in the 20th Century”
Richard Schein – “Traces of the Past: Re-Assembling the National Archive”
Chair: Rani-Henrik Andersson
Donal Carbaugh – “How do we know a Landscape?”
Barbara Mossberg – ““Pigeons on the Grass Alas”--Is All American Literature Eco Lit?”
Mark van de Logt – “Lucky Man’s Land: The Black Hills and Sacred Geography in Arikara Oral Tradition”
Chair: Mark Hersey
Frances Karttunen (paper read by Mark Hersey) – “American Whale Hunting. What Was It All For?”
Karen Jones – “‘Only a mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf’: Wolf conservation, environmental memory and sensory history in North America”
Małgorzata Poks – “The Work of Re-Minding and Re-story-ation: Non-Anthropocentric Animal Ethic in Linda Hogan’s Most Recent Works”
Chair: Aleksi Huhta
Roman Kushnir – “The Upper Midwest Landscape and Masculinity in a Selection of Finnish American Fiction”
Henry Oinas-Kukkonen – “Risto Ryti and the Question of an International Organization of the “Pure Finns” and New Finland in Alaska”
Paul Landsberg – “The U.S. Army, ex-Finnish Officers, and Constructing a Global Cold Region, 1947-1963”
Chair: Kathleen Hilliard
Maria Hurtarte Leon – “Working-Through the Wound”
Joanna Antoniak – “Fatherhood and Trauma - the impact of internment trauma on Japanese-Canadian fatherhood in Kerri Sakamoto's "The Electrical Field"”
Judit Nagy & Matyas Banhegyi – “Representation of Comfort Women in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and in Christina Park’s The Homes We Build on Ashes”
Chair: Nina Öhman
Nathan Gibson – “Fin-A-Billy Music: Performing America and Rebelling in Finland”
Michel Beaulieu & Jenna Kirker - In Search of the “Chicago of the North”: The Evolution of the City of Thunder Bay, Ontario
Chair: Patrick Miller
Outi Hakola – “Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Audiovisual Representations of End-of-Life Care in the United States”
Mona Raeisian – “Urban Blues: Representation of Police Officers as Heroes in American Police Procedural Television”
Anni Calcara – “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Implicit and Explicit Ideology in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (1995)”
Chair: Vincent Veerbeek
Peter Krats – “Not Just Failed Residential Schools: The Trials of Local Education at Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, 1870s-1930s”
Hanna Rask – “Shared history, shared responsibility? Indian Residential Schools and changing conceptions of Canadian history”
Nicholas Timmerman – “Indigenous Landscapes, American Colonization, and Public History in the Early American Republic”
L. K. Bertram - "Curse of the Viking? North American White Nationalism and Viking-Age Imagery"
Chair: Janne Lahti
Margaret Connell-Szasz (paper read by Janne Lahti) – “Red Power versus DAPL: The Changing Face of North American Indigenous Movements”
Minna Pajunen – “Environmental Discourse and Agency Roles in Social Media Representations of Stand with Standing Rock Environmental Movement”
Reetta Humalajoki – “A Program of Pacification: Government Funding and Indigenous Organizations in Canada in the early 1970s”
Johanna Lederer – “Making Place for Indigeneity: Imaginations in Speculative Fiction and Activism”
Chair: Balász Venkovitz
Nick Baxter-Moore & Munroe Eagles – ““Living with the Elephant/Mouse”: Canadian and American Perspectives on Selves, the Border and the Other”
Robert Nelson – “Dinner on the Detroit: Arab Foodways in a Canadian/American Borderland”
Chair: Barbara Mossberg
Nancy Berke – “Teaching North American Literary Protest”
Randolph Lewis – “Personal Matters: Memoir and Method in American Studies”
Chair: Cheryl Greenberg
Viktoria Sophie Lühr – “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Representations and Interpretations of Interculturalism in Québécois Cinema”
Michelle Robinson – “Millennial Authenticity: Remarks on the Cult of Realism in Contemporary North American Stand-Up Comedy”
Frederick Wasser – “Putney Swope, Race and Creative Advertising”
Chair: Paul Spickard
Patrick B. Miller - “Museums and Memorialization: Public History and Black Lives Matter”
Daniel Cobb - “Unreconciled: Indigenous Presents/Presence and Settler Colonial Memory”
Cheryl Greenberg - “Race, Racism and Universities: The Challenges for Historians Addressing Their Own Institutions”
Chair: Emmanuelle Tisserant
Gunlög Fur - “Gender and Concurrent Claims of Authority in the Formation of 18th Century Delaware-European Encounters”
Sami Lakomäki - "‘We Have a Belt to Shew You’: Indigenous Archives and Global War”
Benjamin Madley and Natale Zappia - “Independence and Interdependence: The Colorado River War of 1781-1782 and Indigenous Liberation Struggles in Early America”
Chair: Mikko Saikku
Kimmo Ahonen & Simo Laakkonen – “Beginnings of Environmental Catastrophism: Anthropogenic Apocalypse in American Science Fiction Movies of the 1950s”
Randal Hall – “Algae and the Politics of Energy: Science Fiction in 1950s U.S. Environmental Thought”
Maria Holmgren Troy – “Living with the Virus: Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark and Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite”
Chair: Rani-Henrik Andersson
Francis Flavin - "The Power of Social Network Analysis for Modeling Historical Communities"
Saara Kekki - “Settler-Colonial Border Crossings: Four Island Communities in the Sault Ste. Marie Area”
Justin Gage - “Finnish Americanism and Indigenous Land on Sugar Island, Michigan”
Chair: Lawrence McDonnell
Marlene Broemer – “What are Canvassers, Who are they and Why do we Care?”
Dalia González Delgado – “US Immigration Policy in the 21st Century”
James Henson – “Pandemic Politics and Racial Differences in COVID-19 Attitudes & Behaviors in Texas”
Chair: Outi Hakola
Charlotte Kaiser – “Queer Coming of Age in Québec: Class, Urban Spaces and Asexual Desire in Sarah préfère la course”
Mimi White – “The Hallmark Chronotope”
Misha Kavka – “The Netflix Teen-Chronotopia”
Chair: Aleksi Huhta
John Gilkeson – “"Transcendence" and the "Politics of Pastoralism": The Impact of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Counterculture on Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx”
Niko Heikkilä – “Participatory Democracy and the SDS's Revolutionary Turn”
William Chafe – “The Black Struggle for Freedom from Reconstruction to Now”