Distinguished Speakers

2023-2024

Michelle Shephard

Telling The Truth in a Post-Truth Era

It's getting harder to sort fact from fiction, with the advent of AI and our declining attention spans, along with populist politicians who encourage partisanship in an increasingly divisive world.  Michelle Shephard's talk will consider how journalists and filmmakers can continue to tell stories that matter.
 
Michelle Shephard is an award-winning journalist, author, filmmaker, podcast host, and producer, recognized by the Governor-General's Michener Award for public service journalism.  During her two decades at the Toronto Star, she reported from more than 20 countries, including Somalia, Yemen, Syria,  and Pakistan, going behind the wire at the U.S. Naval prison Guantanamo Bay more than two dozen times.  Among her many projects across multiple media, Shephard is the co-director and producer of the Emmy-nominated and multi-award-winning documentary Guantanamo's Child (TIFF2015).
 
 

 

 

 
 

Dr. Rebecca Major

Indigenous Women in Politics - spontaneous tidal wave or sleeping giant?

Indigenous engagement in Canadian electoral politics has increased since 2015, particularly with the participation of Indigenous women.  Dr. Major's talk focuses on Indigenous women's agency and the harms of reductionist explanations of its roots.

 

 

 

Jason McBride

"Autobiography, Autofiction, Autoeroticism"

Taking up a theme that recurs through Eat Your Mind, my talk will focus on the challenges of writing a biography of a figure like Acker, who refuses ideas of coherent subjectivity in her work (and life) while also compulsively, perpetually mining her biography for that work.  I'll touch on how Acker prefigured some of the most popular auto ficitional writers of the moment - Sheila Heti, Chris Kraus, et al. - why auto ficiton continues to be such a compelling microgenre, and where it might be going next.
 
Jason McBride is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor.  His writing on culture, politics and business has appeared in Maclean's, the Walrus, New York, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, The Believer, Hazlitt, and many other publications.  His acclaimed first book, Eat Your Mind:  The Radical Life and work of Kathy Acker, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2022. 
 

 

Michael Naicker

"The Journey from Africa"

 
Author of African Sons:  The Zululander, Michael Naicker will detail his autobiography from the sacrifices his ancestors made in crossing over into Africa through the dark days of apartheid to growing up as an Indian in a racially segregated society, all of which set the stage for his evolution as an educator to his own modern day political actions and voyage of discovery.
 
Michael Alliemuthu Naicker was born in South Africa and grew up in Zululand.  Naicker was active in the teacher unions in South Africa.  These activities led to his involvement in the amalgamation of all teacher unions into one non racial teacher union in South Africa.  This early involvement led to a natural transition in politics at a municipal level.  Currently a Vice Principal in Windsor, he has been in education for more than 27 years, he has made Windsor his home since 2005. 
 
The event is co-sponsored by Assumption University. 

Deborah Dundas

 

A journalist who grew up poor and almost didn't make it to University, Deborah Dundas will draw from her book, On Class, in which she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor, or are poor, about what happens when we don't talk about poverty or class - and what will happen when we do.  She explores who tells the stories about class and who doesn't, which ones tend to be repeated most often, and why this must change.  Her talk asks the question:  What don't we talk about when we don't talk about class?  And what might happen if, finally, we did?

Deborah Dundas is a writer, journalist and the Books Editor at the Toronto Star with a broad background in the media.  She has interviewed some of the world's most recognizable authors including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whithead, Jonathan Frazen, Zadie Smith and John Irving.  She regularly appears on stage, television and radio and is deeply involved with the literary community, often acting as a juror or host.  She studied English and Political Science at Toronto's York University and is currently pursing and MFA at the University of King's College.  

2022-2023

Randy Boyagoda

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In this talk, novelist and professor Randy Boyagoda (University of Toronto) will make a case for why, who, and what we read can be life or death decisions. He will do so by exploring signal moments in Dante's Divine Comedy with life and death stakes based on the decisions individuals make about who and what they read, how, and why. In turn, having read a canto a day of the Divine Comedy for the past five years while writing a Dante-inspired novel, he will read from Dante's Indiana (Biblioasis), about ordinary people whose lives have been radically changed by the books they took up at high and low points in their lives.

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where has also serves as Vice-Dean, Undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He is the author of six books, including four novels, most recently Dante's Indiana (2021). He writes essays and reviews for the New York Times, the Atlantic, First Things, and the Financial Times (UK). He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.

 

Lawrence Hill

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Lawrence Hill will describe his passion in merging the past, present and future with fiction, and his attempts to explore, dramatize and popularize little known corners of Black history and culture in Canada and around the world. He will draw from, discuss and read brief snippets from his novels The Book of Negroes, The Illegal and Beatrice and Croc Harry, and describe his novel-in-progress about the thousands of African-American soldiers who helped to build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and in Yukon during World War II.

Lawrence Hill is the award-winning author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Book of Negroes and The Illegal. In 2022, Harper Collins Canada published Hill's latest novel, Beatrice and Croc Harry. Hill has volunteered with Crossroads International, The Black Loyalist Heritage Society, and The Ontario Black History Society. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, he also teaches and visits with book clubs in federal penitentiaries. Hill is writing a new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two.

 

2021-2022

Charmaine A. Nelson

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Charmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of Art history and a Tier I Canada Research in Transatlantic black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at the nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University of Halifax, Canada where she is also the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery. Prior to this appointment she worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years. Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the visual culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. She has published seven books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the black Female Subject in Nineteenth Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and, Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018). She has given over 260 lectures, papers, and talks across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, Central America, and the Caribbean. She is actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CTV, City TV News, the Boston Globe, BBC One “Fake or Fortune,” and PBS “Finding your Roots”. She blogs for the Huffington Post Canada and writes for The Walrus. In 2017, she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University.

 

Virginia Postrel

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Textiles are one of humanity's oldest and most influential technologies, but nowadays most people take them for granted. Drawing on her widely praised new book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, author Virginia Postrel will take us on a tour of some of the innovations--in fiber, spinning, weaving, and dyeing--that gave us today's textile abundance and the ways textiles shaped civilization as we know it.

 

2020-2021

Naomi Klein

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Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, On Fire and How To Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other. Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center, and contributor for The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is co-founder of the climate justice organization The Leap.

To watch a recording of the event, please visit our Youtube channel.

For more information about Naomi Klein, please visit naomiklein.org.

 

Erick Laming

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Erick Laming is a PhD candidate in criminology at the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation and his research largely focuses on police use of force, police oversight and accountability, and Indigenous and Black community members' experiences with the criminal justice system.

His dissertation project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Erick's published research has also explored issues concerning police body-worn cameras, Indigenous policing, and police oversight and accountability structures in Canada. Some of Erick's work has been featured in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and the CBC. He is also co-author of a study for the Ontario Human Rights Commission titled, Use of force by the Toronto Police Service: Final Report.

To watch a recording of the event, please visit our Youtube channel.

 

Emma Donoghue

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Emma Donoghue is best known for fiction, which has been translated into over forty languages. She has written literary history and for stage, screen and radio, but is best known for her novels, which range from the historical to the contemporary.

An international bestseller, Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prize, and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Caribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers' Association Libris Awards (Fiction Book and Author of the Year), the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and the W.H. Smith Paperback of the Year Award.; her screen adaptation, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, was nominated for four Academy Awards.

To watch a recording of the event, please visit our Youtube channel.

For more information about Emma Donoghue, please visit emmadonoghue.com.

 

2019-2020

Sook-Yin Lee

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Sook-Yin Lee, multimedia artist and broadcaster, has led a singular career in the belly of Canadian media. The renegade MuchMusic VJ and CBC producer helmed the award-winning DNTO and created the acclaimed interview podcast Sleepover. She writes and directs movies, makes music, choreographs dance, and writes and performs experimental theatre.

Within months of Sook-Yin Lee's 2020 HRG lecture, she made a film in quarantine that touches on many of the topics and issues that she referenced in her lecture.

Watch her film Death and Sickness or follow her on Twitter.

 

Dr. Till van Rahden

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Till van Rahden teaches modern and contemporary history at the Université de Montréal where he held the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies from 2006 to 2016. He is interested in the tension between the elusive promise of democratic equality and the recurrent presence of diversity and moral conflicts. His publications include Jews and other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) and four edited volumes including Emanzipation und Recht: Zur Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaften und der jüdischen Gleichberechtigung. (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 2021). Currently, he is a fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.

Dr. van Rahden's credits discussions that arose during his 2020 HRG talk and visit as part of the inspiration for ideas reflected in this roundable organized in response to his work.

Press, 2008) and four edited volumes including Emanzipation und Recht: Zur Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaften und der jüdischen Gleichberechtigung. (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 2021). Currently, he is a fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.

 

2018-2019

Afua Cooper

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Afua Cooper is the Chair of the Scholarly Panel on Lord Dalhousie's Relationship to Race and Slavery and co-author of the Report. She is also the former James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies and poet Laureate of Halifax 2018-2020. Her research interests are African Canadian studies, with specific regard to the period of enslavement and emancipation in 18th and 19th century Canada and the Black Atlantic; African-Nova Scotian history; political consciousness; community building and culture; slavery's aftermath; Black youth studies. Dr. Cooper founded and chairs the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA).

For more about Afua Cooper, please visit afuacooper.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Sam Green

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Sam Green is an Academy Award-nominated director whose work has screened worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, included in the Whitney Biennial. His most recent projects are “live documentaries” including A Thousand Thoughts (2018) in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, The Measure of All Things (2014), and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012), which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. All three works are performed live, with Green narrating and musicians performing the soundtrack.

For more about Sam Green, please visit samgreen.to.

 

 

 

 

Johan Grimonprez

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Johan Grimonprez's work has been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. His feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by the Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), Double Take (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and Shadow World (2016, in combination with journalist Andrew Feinstein). Travelling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale, Tribeca to Sundance, they garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, and were also acquired by NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4.

For more about Johan Grimonprez, please visit johangrimonprez.be.

 

2017-2018

Samantha Nutt

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Samantha Nutt is an award-winning humanitarian, bestselling author and acclaimed public speaker. A medical doctor and founder of the international humanitarian organizations War Child USA and War Child Canada, Dr. Nutt has worked with children and their families at the frontline of many of the world's major crises - from Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone to Darfur, Sudan. A leading authority on current affairs, conflict, international aid and foreign policy, and member of the Order of Canada, Dr. Nutt is one of the most intrepid and recognized voices in the humanitarian arena. With a career that has spanned more than two decades and dozens of conflict zones, her international work has benefited millions of war-affected children globally.

View the TED Talk or visit War Child Canada.

 

Mike Downie

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Mike Downie is the founder of the film production company Edgarland Films. Downie won a Gemini Award for Best Sports Program or Series in 2005 as coproducer with Nicholas de Pencier of The Hockey Nomad. He has won three Canadian Screen Awards, for Best Science or Nature Documentary in 2014 as director of "Invasion of the Brain Snatchers", which aired as an episode of The Nature of Things; Best Social or Political Documentary Program in 2018 as a producer of The Secret Path; and Best Direction in a Documentary Program in 2020 for the documentary Finding the Secret Path.

Mike Downie is a Director of the DownieWenjack Fund.