On March 11, 2025 at 12:30 pm PT, join UBC Department of History for “Women on the Move: Black Female Immigration to Canada, 1900s-1950s,” a talk by Dr. Saje Mathieu, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair in Arts and Social Sciences in Canada and North America at Carleton University.
This event can be attended in-person in Buchanan Tower 1112 or virtually via Zoom. To join us virtually, please register using the RSVP form linked below.
About the Speaker
Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She earned a joint Ph.D. in History and African American Studies from Yale University and specializes in twentieth century American and African American history with an emphasis on immigration, war, race, globalization, social movements, and political resistance. Her first book, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955, examines the social, cultural, legal, and political impact of African American and West Indian sleeping car porters in Canada. It analyzes black immigrant railway workers’ transnational vision of trade unionism and their political mobilization in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century.
She is currently working on her next book, The Glory of Their Deeds: A Global History of Black Soldiers and the Great War Era. This book examines the experiences of black soldiers and civilians during World War One, both in Allies and Central Powers nations. The book explores how race shaped the politics of enlistment and engagement in the British, Canadian, African, Caribbean, French, American, and German armies. It also discusses how Blacks, whether combatants or intellectual-activists, challenged prevailing racialist ideas and practices during the Great War era. In addition, the book investigates how black soldiers and intellectual-activists responded to international outbreaks of racialized violence in Europe, Southern Africa, and North America as important moments for galvanizing new transnational models of political resistance that redefined black civil rights globally. Together, black soldiers and radicals beat back an international color line—whether defined as colonialism, apartheid, or Jim Crow—viewing each regime as inextricably linked in geopolitical terms.
Prof. Mathieu has earned several international awards and is a former fellow at the University of Heidelberg’s Center for American Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. She is also the recipient of the Arthur ‘Red’ Motley Exemplary Teaching Award.
