Project Team

Building Borders
Justice Across Borders

Principal Investigator

Dr. Benjamin Hoy

Dr. Benjamin Hoy (History, University of Saskatchewan) researches the creation, demarcation, and enforcement of the Canadian-United States border between 1775 and 1924. His work explores the contributions First Nations communities made to the extension of federal power and the uneven impact the border ultimately had on Europeans, African Americans, Chinese, and Indigenous communities.

Collaborators

Dr. Kris Inwood

Dr. Kris Inwood (Economics/History, University of Guelph) leads the University of Guelph’s 1871 and 1891 census projects. He is currently engaged in research linking demographic information in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa together to help understand historical changes to standards of living, racial stratification, social class, and migration.

Dr. Jon Bath

Jon Bath (Art and Art History, University of Saskatchewan) researches the development of the “crystal goblet” metaphor for printing – the belief that the primary function of those who craft information interfaces is to make the medium as unobtrusive as possible so that readers can have the illusion of unmediated communication with their chosen authors. He is the PI for the SSHRC-funded Post-Digital Book Arts project and he was a co-leader of the Modelling and Prototyping Team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative.

Graduate Research Assistants

Tyla Betke

Tyla Betke (History, University of Saskatchewan) is currently in her second year of an MA in History. Her thesis examines the transnational history of the Cree in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She uses GIS to map the relationship between federal power and Indigenous movements in the Saskatchewan-Alberta-Montana borderlands region. Tyla worked on the Building Borders project as both an undergraduate, and graduate student.

Arya Adityan

Arya Adityan (Society and Culture, IIT Gandhinagar) pursued an undergraduate degree from Mount Carmel College, Bangalore in the Humanities and Social Sciences and is currently pursuing Masters in Society and Culture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. Her research interests lies in South Asian studies. She loves traveling and is an avid follower of tennis.

Tarisa Little

Tarisa Little (History, University of Saskatchewan) is a first year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on Indigenous History, Native-Newcomer relationships, and education. She loves learning about Indigenous pedagogies and studying the relationship between Indigenous people and comic books.

Chris Marsh

Chris Marsh (History, University of Saskatchewan) is a PhD Candidate. His research examines a decade of intertribal warfare in the borderlands of northern Montana and southern Alberta in the 1880s involving the Kainai (Blood Tribe) of the Blackfoot Confederacy and the A’aninin (Gros Ventre) and Nakoda (Assiniboine) of Fort Belknap. It explored the influence of environmental alteration in the continuity of equestrian and warrior culture as well as the interaction between the Canadian federal state-in the form of the North West Mounted Police and the local level of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA)- and First Nations peoples in the early reserve era (1876-1900).

Punya Suri

Punya Suri (Society and Culture, IIT Gandhinagar) is a Master's student currently enrolled at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. Her thesis involves the study of neo-colonialism and its impact on policy development & the ban on ivory in India. She is also interested in studying the interactions between people and Visual History and in the development of pedagogical techniques required to make history more accessible and enjoyable to the masses.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Meagan Breault

Meagan Breault worked on the Building Borders project as a research assistant from 2016 until 2018. She recently completed a History Honours degree at the University of Saskatchewan. Meagan will be joining Carleton University in September to complete a thesis based Masters project.

Katherine McPhee

Katherine McPhee is currently in her final year of an History Honours degree as well as working as an undergrad research assistant at the HGIS lab. She enjoys studying late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British medical and social history. After completing her degree, Katherine aims to pursue a Masters degree in history.

Kevin Winterhalt

Kevin Winterhalt has just completed an Honours degree in History at the University of Saskatchewan. Kevin begins study at the University of Colorado in Boulder in September of 2018, pursuing a PhD in American Cold War history. He has worked for the Building Borders project for two summers.

Tenille Holm

Tenille Holm is currently working on her BA in History with a minor in English and a German recognition. Over the summer she is working as an undergrad research assistant in the HGIS lab. After she graduates she intends to pursue an MA in Archival Studies.

Erin Isaac

Erin Isaac completed her B.A. with Honours in History from the University of Saskatchewan. She is beginning a Master’s degree at the University of New Brunswick beginning in the fall of 2018. Erin worked on the Building Borders project over the summer of 2017.

Himanshu Chauhan

Himanshu Chuahan (Chemical Engineering, IIT Gandhinagar) is an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Himanshu's work on the Building Borders Project focused on digital mapping and utilizing Optical Character Recognition to enhance existing data entry approaches.

Steven Langlois

Steven Langlois grew up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and received his Bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Saskatchewan in 2017. He is now pursuing a Master’s degree at the U of S. His research focuses on the role of Canadian uranium in the American nuclear weapons program from 1943-1963.

Kristen Forest

Kristen Forest completed her Bachelor's degree in history from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019.

Olha Sotska

Olha Sotska (Linguistics, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute) is an undergraduate student at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Ukraine who is doing an internship in Canada as a part of Mitacs Globalink program. She is working in the HGIS Lab on Justice Across Borders project, being involved in digitizing federal reports, historical correspondence, and diplomatic records created by Britain, Canada and the United States between 1860 and 1920, mapping this information and contributing to the creation of a database based on British and American extradition reports.

The Building Borders team would like to thank Jane Westhouse, Geoff Cunfer, Jim Clifford, Colin Osmond, Olivia Bird, Sauvelm McClean, and the SURI Team (David Parkinson, Javier Tavitas Medrano, Raj Srinivasan, and many others) for their technical and administrative support on this project.

Updated 07-12-2019

Principal Investigator

Dr. Benjamin Hoy

Collaborators

Sarah Rutley

Sarah Rutley is an assistant librarian at the University of Saskatchewan.

Graduate and Professional School Students

Matthew Kunkel

Matthew Kunkel (History, University of Saskatchewan) is currently in his second year of a MA in history. His thesis examines the transfer of geographic knowledge from Indigenous peoples to Lewis and Clark during the Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804-1806. Previously, Matthew obtained his BA from the University of Toronto and a graduate certificate in GIS and digital geography from Ryerson University.

Harris Ford

Harris Ford (History, University of Saskatchewan) is currently in the second year of an MA. The thesis explores the role of the United Nations in making Jerusalem an international enclave in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the construction of the flawed and still-ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace processes. Harris received a BA Honours degree in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019.

Caitlin M. Woloschuk

Caitlin (they/them) is a current M.A. student at the University of Saskatchewan. Their MA project focuses on the historical socio-cultural production and reproduction of masculinities in the timber industry and how the changing labour regimes in the Ottawa Valley, caused by Britain's demand for Canadian timber, impacted gender and family dynamics in the latter half of the 19th century.

Katherine Faryna

Katherine Faryna received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the University of Alberta in 2007 and is about to enter her second year of Law at the University of Saskatchewan. She is keenly interested in the evolution of Canada's justice system and its historical treatment of women and Indigenous persons.

Keiran Leggo-Henderson is excitedly beginning her MA in history. She is most interested in transitions from cooperation to conflict in Indigenous-settler relations in 19th century Alberta and Saskatchewan. Her project focuses on British grain extraction in western Canada and its impact on the social, political, and economic relationships in the area

Undergraduate Students

Alan Wobeser

Alan Wobeser is currently in the final year of an Honors History Degree, as well as a minor in English and a certificate in Global Studies, at the University of Saskatchewan. His research interests include the creation and implementation of borders, Irish History, and Western Canadian Social History. Alan aims to pursue a Master’s degree in History going forward

Christina McRorie

Christina is working on her undergraduate in International Studies with a minor in Economics at the University of Saskatchewan. She is passionate about social and planetary welfare and can often be found reading, climbing, or eating a good dark chocolate.

Louis Taylor

Louis Taylor is currently undertaking a BA in Geography at the University of Durham, where he is also co-president of the Geographical Society. His research interests include bordering practices, climate adaptation of urban areas and utilizing GIS methods. Louis aims to pursue a Master's degree in the future.

Mariana Martinez Guevara

Mariana Martinez Guevara is currently undertaking a BA in English (honours) and Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. As part of the Justice Across Borders project she catalogued information about the Prince Albert penitentiary (prisoner treatment, labor, prison escapes), wrote documentation, and transcribed more than a thousand pages of extradition records.

Lucas Schultz

Lucas Schultz recently completed a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Saskatchewan. During his time working in the historical GIS lab, he has primarily focused upon the creation and maintenance of supplementary datasets constructed from Saskatchewan’s prison registers.

María Sánchez

María is currently finishing her bachelor's degree in International Relations and Political Studies in Bogotá, Colombia. Her areas of research interest are philosophy and conceptual history, international history and Public International Law. Her participation in the Justice Across Borders project has focused on the formal extradition process between the United States and Canada in the first half of the 20th century.

Simran Anand

Simran Anand is a student of Political science and Economics at Ramjas College, University of Delhi, India. She wishes to pursue her career in public policy and is intuitively passionate about gender equality, child rights and youth activism. She is currently working under Professor Benjamin Hoy, at University of Saskatchewan as a research assistant and also involved with UNESCO as a research fellow.

Aanika Aery

A final year business administration and law student with a knack of the metaverse, a hint of analytics and a passion for international law.