The Humanities Council’s Fund for Canadian Studies has named historian and religious studies scholar Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa) as the 2023-24 Laurence G. Pathy ’56 Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies.
Anderson, professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Ottawa, is an expert on the religious encounters between Catholic missionaries and Indigenous peoples in colonial North America. As Pathy Visiting Professor, Anderson will spend the fall semester on campus where she will collaborate with students and scholars on subjects related to Canada and the circumpolar region.
She will teach the Program in Humanistic Studies course “Indigenous Peoples and Christianity.” The undergraduate course will explore the effects of contact between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples from early 17th century encounters in Canada and North American into the residential schools of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Anderson joined the University of Ottawa faculty in 2005, after receiving her Ph.D. in American religious history from Harvard University. She is the author of two award-winning books, “The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert” and “The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs.” At Princeton, she will continue to write her current monograph-in-progress, “Dawn in the West: How the Thought of Indigenous People Ushered in Modernity,” which delineates the seminal impact of Indigenous perspectives upon Enlightenment philosophies.
