Vito Adriaensens is a scholar and filmmaker. He is currently an adjunct associate professor of Film at Columbia University and a researcher at the Centre for Research in Cinema and Performing Arts at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is a co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017), the author of the upcoming Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema (2023), and is currently working on the edited collection The Tableau Vivant: From Living Pictures to Moving Images. As a filmmaker, Vito works primarily on celluloid and teaches at Brooklyn cinema-arts non-profit Mono No Aware.
Jill Aston is a lecturer at Texas A&M University – Kingsville. She is currently completing her dissertation for her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas where she is studying American Literature from 1865 to 1945.
Diana Birchall is Eaton’s granddaughter and author of the biography Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton, as well as several Jane Austen related novels and scholarly essays.
Paul Birchall, who will read the part of “Tama” in Rena Heinrich’s staged reading, is a descendent of Eaton and manages the library on Catalina Island. A graduate of the University of Chicago (BA) and the University of North Texas (MLIS), Paul also is an unrequited actor, having appeared in the Chicago company of NOISES OFF, and has worked for many years as a theater critic for various Los Angeles newspapers and websites. He was notorious (during the lockdown) for his virtual library program series “Storytime For Grownups.
Donna Campbell is professor of English at Washington State University. Her latest book is Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (2016), and other recent works appear in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton (2023), American Literary Realism (2023), New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (2023), and Ireland, Irish America, and Work (2018). She is working on a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in the 30-volume Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Edith Wharton, a series for which she is associate editor.
Mary Chapman is the Director of the Winnifred Eaton Archive. She is the author of Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Eaton and is currently writing a microhistory of the Eaton family.
Lily Cho is Vice-Provost and Associate Vice President (International) at Western University. Her book, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, examines the relationship between Chinese restaurants and Canadian culture. Most recently she is the author of Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the MAking of Non-Citizens in Canada, a SSHRC-funded open-access publication that focuses on Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as “C.I. 9’s.” Dr. Cho is also Associate Dean, Global and Community Engagement and a leading public humanities scholar in Canada.
Jean Lee Cole is the author of Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity, the first monograph on Eaton. Dr. Cole is also co-editor of John Luther Long: Madame Butterfly and Onoto Watanna: A Japanese Nightingale and a leading literary recovery scholar. More recently, she published How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture.
Colleen Kim Daniher is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her manuscript in-progress writes a cultural history of the mixed-raced actress/entertainer; it argues that these ubiquitous yet understudied social figures document the suppressed memory of transnational empire in popular “American” entertainment. She is co-editor (with Katherine Zien) of a special issue of TRIC/RTAC on “Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands,” and in 2021, her essay on E. Pauline Johnson won the ATHE Outstanding Article Award.
Dominika Ferens is associate professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches American literature. She holds a PhD from UCLA and a postdoctoral degree from the University of Wrocław. Most of her research has focused on American minority literatures. In Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (U of Illinois P, 2002), she examined the paradoxes of Orientalism in the Eaton sisters’ works. Her book Ways of Knowing Small Places: Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography since the 1960s (Wrocław UP, 2011) looked at literature’s quarrels and affinities with ethnography in the age of multiculturalism. Her current project explores the writings of Sigrid Nunez through affect theory.
Shoshannah Ganz is associate professor of Canadian literature at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University. In 2008 she co-edited a collection of essays with University of Ottawa Press on Canadian poet Al Purdy. In 2017 she published Eastern Encounters: Canadian Women’s Writing about the East, 1867-1929 with National Taiwan University Press. Shoshannah is currently revising a manuscript entitled Now I Am Become Death: Industry and Disease in Canadian and Japanese Literature for McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Shelley Hulan is Associate Professor and past Chair of the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Waterloo. Her current research focuses on late 19th- and early 20th-century women writers in Canada who wrote for international audiences. Her essays have appeared in University of Toronto Quarterly, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Mosaic among other journals.
Rena M. Heinrich is a theater director and actor who has been directing and performing professionally for over twenty years. She received her PhD in Theater Studies from the UC Santa Barbara, specializing in the shifting identities of mixed-race figures in American drama. Heinrich is an associate professor of Theater Practice in Critical Studies at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, the chair of Dramatic Writing/Critical Studies, and an affiliated professor of East Asian studies in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Her book, Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama, explores multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day.
Dale Lee Kwong is a Mohkintsis based poet, playwright, and essayist. A native Calgarian, she is a third-generation settler of Chinese descent. Her work explores Chinese-Canadian history, diversity & inclusion, adoption, and LGBTQ issues. She performs under the direction of a border collie/heeler cross named Fonzarelli, and she is passionate about Chinatowns in Calgary and other Canadian cities.
Kesia Kvill is a PhD Candidate at the University of Guelph and the Chief Curator at Heritage Park Historical Village. Her academic work explores the impact of the First World War on Canadian foodways and kitchens through women’s activism, cookbooks, and print media. As a curator, she is actively working to decolonize and diversify narratives, collections, and exhibits in collaboration with the broad communities that call Treaty 7 lands home.
Hedy Law is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Music Theory and History at the University of Chicago. She has published in Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, Musique et Geste en France: De Lully à la Révolution, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Censorship, the Oxford Handbook on Music and the Body, and the collection of essays Noises, Audition, Aurality: History of the Sonic Worlds in Europe, 1500–1918. Her book, Music, Pantomime, and Enlightenment France, was published by Boydell in 2020.
Sydney Lines is completing a dissertation at UBC about Winnifred Eaton, including her Alberta years. She is Project Manager of the Winnifred Eaton Archive, a participant in UBC’s Arts Amplifier and Public Scholars Initiatives, and a Public Humanities Hub coop alumna with significant experience with intersectoral knowledge exchange through years working in Communications at Arizona State University.
Karintha Lowe is the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Public Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. She recently earned her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and is at work on her first book project, Media Alchemy: Experiments in Asian American Art and Literature. She has held fellowships at the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of Chinese in America, where she curated exhibitions on Asian/American multimedia art and immigration history.
Yuki Matsumoto is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Literature, Arts and Cultural Studies at Kindai University in Osaka. She received her doctorate from the Graduate School of Language and Culture at Osaka University. Her recent articles include: “Border-Crossings in Asian American Literature: Three Short Stories by Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far” (Bulletin of the School of Literature, Arts and Cultural Studies, Kindai University. 30-2, 2019) and “Women’s Tears and Gendered Labor in America Is in the Heart” (AALA Journal. 24, 2018).
Christena McKillop is a librarian at the University of Calgary. From 2018 to 2020 she was the learning, engagement, and outreach librarian for Archives and Special Collections. From 2020-2022 she was Interim Associate University Librarian role for Archives and Special Collections. Her research interests include student learning, information literacy, and primary source literacy. Ms. McKillop holds a BA, University of Toronto and an MLIS, Western University.
Annie Murray is Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at the University of Calgary’s Libraries and Cultural Resources. She is a co-applicant in the SSHRC-funded Spokenweb project to develop web-based interfaces for the exploration of digitized literary audio recordings. She currently oversees the preservation of the EMI Music Canada Archive, with support from the Mellon Foundation. She holds a MA in English and a Master of Library and Information Studies, both from UBC.
Nancy Rao is a Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Her award-winning book, Chinatown Opera Theatre in North American (2017) analyses the transnational networks of such troupes particularly Chinese opera troupes and the impact of US and Canadian anti-Chinese immigration policies on theaters. Rao’s work bridges musicology, Chinese opera and Sinophone studies.
Frank Rooney and Jim Rooney of Toronto are the sons of Winnifred’s grandson Dr. Paul G. “Tim” Rooney and will be performing parts in Rena Heinrich’s staged reading of “Tama.”
Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Ringer, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.
Karen Skinazi is Associate Professor and Director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the Canadian Association for American Studies’ book prize and editor of Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012).
Koby Song-Nichols is a PhD Candidate in History with a collaborative specialization in Food Studies at the University of Toronto. His dissertation offers a comparative and transnational history of Chinese Canadian and American restaurateurs, grocers, cookbook authors and community members as they cooked and ate with others in the multicultural cities of Phoenix, Montréal, and Toronto. While centering Chinese Canadian and Chinese American voices and foodways, his work aims to help us recognize and reimagine the many ways we do and can relate to one another, our foods and our pasts.
Joey Takeda is a Digital Humanities Developer for the DH Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University and is Technical Director of the Winnifred Eaton Archive. He holds an MA in English from UBC where he edited the first critical digital edition of Eaton’s novel His Royal Nibs (1925).
Spencer Tricker is an assistant professor at Clark University and is working on a book manuscript entitled Imminent Communities: Liberal Cosmopolitanism and Empire in Transpacific Literature, which explores the theme of migration in works by Winnifred and Edith Eaton and other Asian American authors and filmmakers.
S. Louisa Wei is a Professor in the School of Creative Media at the City U of HK and an award-winning author, documentary film producer, writer and director, and a member of Hong Kong’s Directors’ Guild. Her films have won numerous awards. Havana Divas and her Golden Gate Girls (2014) have screened in numerous festivals around the world.
Jason Wiens is a Canadian Literature scholar and professor in the English Department at the University of Calgary.
Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 as well as co-director of the queer studies network qUCL at University College London. Their first book Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in 19th-century America won Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award as well as an Arthur Miller First Book Prize Honourable Mention from the British Association of American Studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Quarterly, J19, Journal of Asian American studies, Occasion, as well as edited collections Q&A 2.0: Voices from Queen Asian North America, Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body and Cambridge History of Queer American Literature. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas podcast.
Linda Yip is a certified genealogist specializing in Chinese Canadian genealogical and historical research. She’s been featured on multiple occasions on CBC Radio; newspapers such as the Toronto Sun, Sing Tao Daily, and The Tyee; on TV; and on live international social media events. She’s written and performed stories on stage. She is an entrepreneur with two businesses: The Admin Gap®, working with entrepreneurs who need process solutions for out-of-control businesses; and as a professional genealogist. Her personal library of electronic material is in excess of 20,000 notes and 40,000 images. Her blog, Past-Presence.com, has been read by over 200,000 people in 182 countries. She is the author of Getting Started in Chinese Genealogy: A Family Historian’s Guide (Even If You Don’t Speak Chinese).
Shuyin Yu is a Ph.D. Candidate at University of Calgary. Her work explores the intersections of Asian diaspora studies, asexuality studies, and food studies in children’s and young adult literature. She received her Honours B.A. from the University of Toronto and her M.A. from University of Calgary.