Paula Hastings received her Ph.D. from Duke University. Before coming to the University of Toronto in 2012 she was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba. Her research centers on the imperial and global contexts of Canada’s political, social and cultural histories during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is interested, more specifically, in Canada’s evolving relationship with Britain and the Caribbean since Confederation and in the histories of imperialism/colonialism, race, migration, and nationalism.

Her current book project explores Canadian campaigns to annex Britain’s West Indian colonies from the 1880s to the months immediately following the First World War. Based on research in Canada, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and the United Kingdom, her work queries the implications of these “sub-imperial” campaigns for colonial independence and nation-state formation in the twentieth century. She is also working on a collection, co-edited with Jacob Remes, titled “Empire, Continent, Globe: Canadian History in Transnational Perspective,” for McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Professor Hastings will continue exploring Canada’s global coordinates in her next research project, which questions how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 reoriented spatial imaginaries in Atlantic and Pacific Canada. It examines, in particular, how the circular pull around, rather than through, the continent reordered regional economies and identities and subsequently altered the way coastal Canadians conceptualized their relationship to the “nation” in the twentieth century.

Credentials

Ph.D. Duke University
M.A. Carleton University

Areas of Research

• Imperialism/colonialism
• Nationalism
• Migration
• British Empire
• Canada
• Caribbean