2024-2025
Searching for History and Truth on Screen
In this exclusive talk Jesse Wente, the bestselling author, award winning speaker and longtime film critic and curator, will explore truth, history and Indigenous representation on screen in the films, The Searchers and Maliglutit (Searchers). The Searchers is among the most famous films by legendary director John Ford, starring his muse John Wayne, while Maliglutit (Searchers) is a modern remake by equally legendary director Zacharius Kunuk set in the Arctic. Using both films, Jesse will explore Indigenous representation in cinema, narrative sovereignty, and how our understanding of history is shaped by screen storytelling.
Talk to be followed by special WIFF screening of Zacharius Kanuk's Maliglutit (Searchers)
Randy Boyagoda
Civil discourse or civil war? Ideas and Realities of the Contemporary University
Please join us for a special evening featuring Randy Boyagoda with the CBC's Nahlah Ayed in attendance. This event will be recorded for an international audience for CBC IDEAS.
Civil discourse or civil war? Ideas and Realities of the Contemporary University
Man wearing glasses standing next to a treeIn this lecture, novelist and professor Randy Boyagoda argues that universities have always been expected to promote civil discourse and never satisfy anyone’s expectations that they are doing so successfully. This gap between idea and reality is consistent with a larger gap between ideas and realities of the university, which are always subject to criticism and complaint from their constituents and from the public at large, that they are failing to fulfil their missions and instead sustaining endless conflicts and controversies. Do we assign seemingly unmeetable expectations to the university itself, and can there be another way to close the gap between our ideas about it, and its realities? And could a more durable conception of civil discourse itself be a way of doing so?
Randy Boyagoda is the University of Toronto’s advisor on Civil Discourse. The author of seven books, including four novels, a novella, a critical biography, and a scholarly monograph, he is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as Vice-Dean, Undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to a variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, while appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017. He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.
2023-2024
Timotheus Vermeulen
Metamodernism in three figures: metaxy, parafiction, and depthiness
Sometime between 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and the climate crisis, culture got, as a Guardian critic put it, “weird.” The late twentieth-century culture was defined by cynicism and irony, a sense that History, for better or worse, had ended, that all there was the here and now - the indifference of the ‘smart film,’ the hopelessness of Grunge and the critical parody of metafiction. Postmodernism is the name theorists give to these “senses of an end”. But now, amid socio-economic and environmental turmoil, filmmakers, musicians, and writers suddenly showed a proclivity towards sincerity, naivety, hope, and even utopianism: ‘quirky’ cinema, the new folk, the ‘new sincerity’. Whatever this was, it was not postmodern – but weird, indeed. In this talk, Professor Vermeulen considers this shift from postmodernism to what he and others have come to call metamodernism through a consideration of three prevalent aesthetic figures - metaxy, parafiction, and depthiness - in the context of changes in contemporary capitalism.
Timotheus Vermeulen is Professor of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, and a 2023/24 visiting scholar in Art History at Harvard. He has written extensively on contemporary art, screen media and culture. His research on metamodernism has been translated into multiple languages, inspired numerous conferences, special issues and exhibits, and is cited widely, incl. discussions in the NYT, TLS, BBC, Art News and Log. His research has been discussed in popular media worldwide, including but not limited to The New York Times, BBC, The Telegraph, Die Zeit, Tagesspiegel, Haaretz, Corriere Della Sera, NRC, Dagbladet, Morgenbladet, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, De Groene Amsterdammer, Vrij Nederland, Klassekampen, Observator Cultural, Adbusters, Frieze, Art News, Art Pulse, Flashart, Metropolis M, Salon, Scenario, Log, TANK, Hyperallergic, Vulture, Billboard and even EOnline. Venues for his public talks include universities and institutions around the globe, including the Venice Biennial, BBC Radio Theatre, Strelka, Documenta, Frieze Art Fair, Dostoyevsky Library Moscow, CAFA Bejing, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, E-Flux, Columbia School of Architecture NYC, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis, and the Centre for Contemporary Art Alexandria. Together with TV presenter Gia Milinovich, he hosts the ideas podcast The Cluster F Theory.
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.
Dr. Rebecca Major
Indigenous Women in Politics - spontaneous tidal wave or sleeping giant?
Jason McBride
"Autobiography, Autofiction, Autoeroticism"
Michael Naicker
"The Journey from Africa"
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.