Dr. Jordan Stanger-Ross

Bio

My research and teaching focus on migration, race, and inequality in the twentieth century, especially in North America. I am currently the Co-Director, with Audrey Kobayashi (Queen’s University), of Past Wrongs, Future Choices, a 7-year (2022-2029) multi-sector and community-engaged project to integrate and tell the history of the internment, incarceration, and dispossession of people of Japanese descent in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States in the 1940s. Previously, I directed Landscapes of Injustice, a partnership focussed on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians. Landscapes of Injustice was recognized with many awards, including a Heritage BC prize for outstanding contributions to provincial history, a Canadian Race Relations Foundation award for excellence in anti-racist education, and a prize from the Canadian Historical Association for excellence in public history. Its capstone exhibition, “Broken Promises,” created under the leadership of the Nikkei National Museum and the Royal BC Museum, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award. 

With collaborators in Canada and Japan, I am also in the midst of a SSHRC funded project entitled Exile: The Expulsion of Japanese Canadians, 1946, on the political decisions and legal battle that resulted in the exile of 4,000 Japanese Canadians to Japan after the close of the Second World War.

Landscapes of Injustice: Reflections on 7 years of community engaged research
(A talk for the Vancouver Historical Society, September 23, 2021)

In 2022, Dr. Stanger-Ross was the first UVic Professor to Receive a SSHRC Impact Award.

Selected publications

Books:

• Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (McGill-Queens University Press, 2020).

• Witness to Loss: Race, Culpability, and Memory in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (McGill Queens University Press, 2017), with Pamela Sugiman.

     * Finalist, Wilson Institute Book Prize (2018) 

• Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Articles and chapters:

• "Separate National Apologies, Transnational Injustices: Second World War Oppression, Anti-Japanese Persecution, and the Politics of Apology in Five Countries" with Matt James (lead author), Jessica Fernandez de Lara Harada, Masumi Izumi, and Monica Okamoto, Global Studies Quarterly 2, 4 (2022), 1-13.

• "White Jews of Victoria, 1858-1914," in Ellen Eisenberg ed., Jewish Identities in the American West: Relational Perspectives (Brandeis Press, 2022), 28-56, with Lynne Marks.

• “Constitutional Wrongs: The Wartime Constitution and Japanese Canadians, c. 1942-1946,” in Barry Wright et al. eds, Canadian State Trials, Volume V (University of Toronto, 2022), with Eric Adams.

• “Remembering the Holocaust in a Settler Colonial City: The Case of Victoria, Canada” History & Memory 34, 1 (2022), with Lynne Marks.

            * Recipient of the Swizter-Cooperstock Prize in Jewish History

• “Naziism in Canada”?: The Internment of Japanese Canadians and the History of Comparison,” in Helga Thorson and Charlotte Schallie Ed., After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2020), 63-82.

• “Impermanent Apologies: on the Dynamics of Timing and Public Knowledge in Political Apology", Human Rights Review with Matt James & the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective Hum Rights Rev (2018). 

• “The Unfaithful Custodian: Glenn McPherson and the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians,” Journal of American Ethnic History (summer 2018), with Will Archibald and the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective.

• “Promises of Law: The Unlawful Dispossession of Japanese Canadians,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 54, 3 (2017), with Eric Adams and the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective.

* Recipient of the Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism Article Prize (2018), Canadian Historical Association

** Recipient of the Political History Group Prize for the Best English Language Article (2018), Canadian Historical Association

•  “‘My Land is worth a million dollars’: How Japanese Canadians contested their dispossession in the 1940s” Law and History Review 35, 3 (2017), with Nicholas Blomley and the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective.

• “Suspect Properties: The Vancouver Origins of the Forced Sale of Japanese-Canadian-owned Property, WWII" Journal of Planning History 15, 4 (2016), 271-289, with the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective.

* Best article in the Journal of Planning History (2015-2017), The Society for American City and Regional Planning History 

• “Choreographies of Urban Life: Mapping the Social History of the City,” in Nicholas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin eds., Cities Beyond Borders: Global Comparative and Transnational Approaches to History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 61-78. 

• “Telling a Difficult Past: Kishizo Kimura’s Memoir of Entanglement in Racist Policy,” BC Studies, 181 (Spring 2014), 39-62. 

* Recipient of the Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism Article Prize. 

•  with Hildy S. Ross, "Placing the Poor: The Ecology of Poverty in Postwar Urban Canada", Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes 46, 1 (2012), 213-240.

• "Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over Indian Reserves, 1928-1950s," Canadian Historical Review 89, 4 (2008), 541-580.

• "Neither Fight nor Flight: Urban Synagogues in Postwar Philadelphia," Journal of Urban History 32, 6 (2006), 791-812.

• “Falling Far From the Tree: Transitions to Adulthood and the Social History of Twentieth-Century America” Social Science History 29, 4 (2005), 625-648, with Christina Collins and Marc J. Stern.

Op-Eds

• "Concerned about foreign interference in Canada? An 'enemy agent' registry is not the answer" Invited Contribution to The Conversation Canada, April 17, 2023

• “Opinion: Exhibition exposes multi-generational trauma caused by dispossession of Japanese Canadians,” with Leah Best, Nicholas Blomley, Audrey Kobayashi, and Sherri Kajiwara, Vancouver Sun, October 3, 2020.

• “Why the People’s Party of Canada election result should not be underestimated,” with Oliver Schmidtke, CBC Opinion, November 13, 2019.

• “We have seen this before in B.C.” with Eric Adams, Nicholas Blomley, and Vivian Wakabayashi Rygnestad, Canadaland.ca, October 2, 2019.

• “Japanese Canadians deserve justice from B.C.” Globe and Mail, September 21, 2019.

• “Teahouse plan offers vision for Esquimalt” with John Lutz, Kaitlin Findlay, and Tsugio Kurushima, Times Colonist April 14, 2019.

• “A Political Apology is Just a Beginning,” with Matt James Globe and Mail, December 1, 2017.

• “A Cautionary Tale from Canada’s Past,” The Toronto Star, November 22, 2017

• “Remembering promises – lessons from 75^th anniversary of dispossession of Japanese Canadians” Vancouver Sun, 26 March 2017, with Eric Adams (also carried in the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, and the Montreal Gazette).

• "Lessons from the Japanese Canadian Internments: Policies built on fear won't make us safer,” Globe and Mail, 19 January, 2016, with Eric Adams and Laura Madokoro.

• "Attack on niqab a backward step for Canada”, Victoria Times-Colonist, 8 October 2015, with Lynne Marks.

Courses

Grad students

Recent Graduate and Honours Student Supervisions

Completed:

• Nathaniel Hayes, MA: Why Won’t the Pieces Fit?: Uncovering Deviations in the Compensation Awarded to Japanese Canadians at the Bird Commission (2022)
• Josh Van Es, MA: How the Other Half Lives: Moral Environmentalism, Slums, and the World War Two Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (2021)
• Oakley Ramprashad, MA: From Spaces of Mercy to Sites of Sanctuary: A Historical Survey of Canada’s Federal Prison Libraries (2020)
• Jennifer Landry, Hon: “Democracy? What a farce”: The Marpole-Richmond Review’s Anti-Racist Coverage During World War Two (2020)
• Elyse Abma, MA: She Never Felt at Home Here (2020)
• Shaun Williamson MA: Creating the American Carceral State: The Evolution of Liberal Criminology (2018)
• Julie Bristow, MA: Muslim Immigrants in Canada: Linking and Legitimizing Identity and Security (2018)
• Steve Fielding, PhD: Sporting Multiculturalism: Toronto’s Postwar European Immigrants, Gender, Diaspora, and the Grassroots Making of Canadian Diversity (2018)
• Kaitlin Findley, MA: The Bird Commission, Japanese Canadians, and the challenge of reparations in the wake of state violence (2017)
• Kate Siemens, Hon: Witnessing Internment: Captain V.C. Best’s Letters to Ottawa  (2017)
• Elspeth Gow, Hon: Reconciliation in Theatres of Living Memory: Unsettling Fort Edmonton Park, with Lynne Marks (2017)
• Martin Strong, Hon: Japanese Canadians and Internment: The Role of The New Canadian as an Agent of Resistance, 1941-1945 (2017)

 Post Doctoral:

• Yasmin Railton, Postdoc: Landscapes of Injustice (2022)
• Eiji Okawa, Postdoc: Landscapes of Injustice (2018)
• Letitia Johnson (current)
• Andrea Mariko Grant (current)