In early January, Andrea Geiger (Simon Fraser University) read from her new award-winning book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands (2022).
Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, Geiger highlighted the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border. In the last half of the 19th century and early 20th century, imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands.
Andrea Geiger received three Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) academic year fellowships from 1999 through 2002 through the Canadian Studies Center for the study of Japanese. Her doctoral thesis, from the UW Department of History, is titled “Refracting Difference: Japanese Immigrant Negotiations of Race, Caste and Class in the North American West” and was later published by Yale University Press.
The reading was sponsored by the Canadian Studies Center, East Asia Center, UW Japan Studies Program, and Center for Global Studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; the Department of History; the Consulate General of Canada in Seattle; and the World Affairs Council, Seattle.