Kajsa Louise Swaffer
"An undergraduate from the University of Glasgow set me on course to study the Scots in British Empire and North American contexts, taking me to Nova Scotia in 2018 for my MA. Within literature on the Scottish diaspora and the Scots in Canada I see a need for increased focus on migrants' social and political realities at the local level. While exploring different ways that members of Canada's Scottish community engaged with civil society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allows us to address gender-, class- and geographic biases that shape interpretations of this historic community to this day, studying the diasporic nature of Canadian majority culture lays bare its settler-colonial construction, allowing us to retrace this process in new detail."
Kajsa Louise Swaffer is a PhD student in the Department of History and Classical Studies and holder of the Canadian-Scottish Studies Doctoral Fellowship. The Fellowship was established in 2020 through the generous support of members of the St. Andrew's Society of Montreal.