Education

 

Awards and Grants

 

Academic Appointments, Scientific Activities & Outreach

• Speaker of Emerging Scholars Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking countries *GKS)
• Conference Organization: annual conference of Emerging Scholars Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries (GKS), Contested Canada: Navigating Past, Present and Future Sovereignties, 2023, Freie Universität Berlin
• Conference Organization: annual interdisciplinary graduate conference of the History, Classics, and Religion Graduate Students' Association (HCRGSA), Societies in Crisis: Reactions, Reslience, and Resolutions, 2023, University of Alberta

 

Memberships

• Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries (GKS)

• German Studies Association, (GSA)

Research Interests

• German Canadian Studies
• Canadian Prairie History
• Indigenous-Settler Encounters
• Settler Colonialism
• Indigenous Studies

 

Ph.D. Project

German Canadians as Settler Colonists: Transatlantic Migration and German-Indigenous Encounters on the Canadian Prairies, 1890-1940

My PhD project explores German-Indigenous encounters on the Canadian prairies from 1890 to 1940. It responds to calls to include settler colonial perspectives in a changing historiography of German Canadians. Tracking the history of German migrants in the three prairie provinces Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, my PhD project asks how German migrants encountered and interacted with Indigenous communities, how settler colonial legislation and policies framed these encounters, and in what ways German migrants contributed to—or problematized and addressed—processes of Indigenous dispossession. So far, ethnic histories on German Canadians have not studied German Canadians as settler colonists. This PhD project, in turn, shows, German Canadians did participate in and benefit from settler colonialism in multifaceted ways. Indigenous removal to reserves made room for German migrants and their homesteads, German priests worked in residential schools, and German migrants were involved in the extraction and mining of natural resources on the Canadian prairies that pushed Indigenous people off the land. German migration to Canada thus created complex connections and complicities in processes of Indigenous dispossession on different levels. By tracing German-Indigenous interactions in Canada, I seek to include German settler colonial movements into general discourses on German colonialism, contributing to the history of German colonial activity outside the nation state’s realm.

Publications

• Review of Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay. Plundering the North. A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Security, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023, 218pp. In: Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 45, 2025: 161-162. http://www.kanada-studien.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/zks_2025_11_Rez.pdf

• Review of Benjamin Bryce. The Boundaries of Ethnicity. German Immigration and the Language of Belonging in Ontario, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022, 244pp. In: Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 44, 2024: 117-118. http://www.kanada-studien.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/zks_2024_10_Rez.pdf.

• Review of Jeffrey Denis. Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press 2020, 365pp. In: Past Imperfect 25, 2023: 77-81. https://doi.org/10.21971/pi29395.