Miranda Burgess is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC. She specializes in British and Irish Romantic-period writing and in the history and theory of feeling, mobility, media/mediation, and literary form. Her first book, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000 and considered the way genre and genre change mediated emergent theories of social cohesion and, ultimately-nation-ness. Her most recent series of articles investigates intersections of mobility, mediation, and figuration in Wordsworth, Owenson, and Mary Shelley. A book in progress, Romantic Transport, 1790-1830, considers the figuration of being with others in the contexts of global mobility and coloniality.

Jeff Derksen is SFU Dean and Associate Provost of Graduate Studies, Professor of English, and an associate member of the Department of Geography. He published two collections of essays, Annihilated Time: poetry and other politics(2009) and After Euphoria (2013). His related teaching and research include cultural studies, Asian North American poetics and critical theory. He is also the author of four collections of poetry: The Vestiges (2014), Transnational Muscle Cars (2003), Dwell (1994), and Down Time (1990), which won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award.  In 2004, Jeff formed, with the artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, the research collective, Urban Subjects, whose work on cities, militancy, and autogestion has been presented in the form of edited volumes, bookworks, curated exhibitions, public posters, situations and para-academic seminars. Jeff was a Fulbright fellow at City University of New York (1999) and research fellow at The Centre for Place, Culture and Politics (2001-2003) where he worked and collaborated with the geographer Neil Smith.

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal histories and Professor in the UBC Department of Sociology. Her first book, Colonial Proximities (University of Chicago Press, 2009), details legal encounters between Indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, Europeans, and those enumerated as “mixed race” along Canada’s west coast. The book considers how state racisms were produced and mobilized through land, law, and labour in sites of colonial re-settlement and offers a critical engagement with Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics. Her second book, Across Oceans of Law (Duke UP, 2018), traces the currents and counter-currents of British/ colonial law and Indian radicalism through the 1914 journey of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese owned steamship. It explores the entanglements between transatlantic slavery, efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waterways, Indian indenture, and “free” migration.

Debra Sparrow is a weaver, artist and designer who was born and raised at Musqueam Indian Village. Her work combines textile and Salish design into geometric blankets. Her work revives Chiefs blankets for Musqueam cultural use and she also makes hangings that are prominent at Vancouver Airport, Museum of Anthropology and the Smithsonian. Sparrow designed the logo for the Canadian Men’s Hockey Team for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Vancouver. She continues to work on pieces close to her heart at her home in Musqueam and for over thirty years has played a pivotal role in the ongoing revival of Musqueam weaving. In 2023, Debra and Aleen Sparrow opened the Salish Blanket Co., in part as an extension of Debra’s ongoing project, Blanketing the City that aims to encourage Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to build a deeper understanding of living Coast Salish Culture. The Salish Blanket Co. ensures that Musqueam history, traditions and practice continue to resonate.

Sara Stevens is Associate Professor and Chair, Urban Design in the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC. She is an architectural and urban historian whose research focuses on the link between architecture and capital. She writes about the relationship between real estate developers and architects in the twentieth century, uncovering how money has shaped cities. Sara’s first book was Developing Expertise: Architecture and Real Estate in Metropolitan America (Yale UP, 2016). Sara was awarded a 2019 Research Fellowship with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) that supports her second book project, titled Building Capital. The book focuses on large, urban redevelopment projects to understand, amid the deregulation and financialization of the 1970s-80s, the contingent relationships between financing, professional practice, and design.

Janet Wang (b. 1977, Vancouver) is a visual artist and educator with a pluralistic practice, integrating sculptural installation, painting, drawing and new media. Her work explores the construction of identity through the appropriation and disruption of social patterns. Wang’s work borrows from the canons and traditions of history, both the artistic and the quotidian, in order to use the familiar as a meeting point with the viewer. A second-generation settler of Chinese heritage, Wang is based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in studio practice from the University of Leeds. She has created public art projects for the City of Vancouver, Public Art Richmond, the City of New Westminster and CMHC Ottawa, and is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation, b. 1977) is an artist and curator of mixed Secwépemc and settler ancestry. Willard’s research and creative processes are informed by land-based and community-engaged art practices, connections to culture and family, and intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Often focusing on Secwépemc aesthetics, language and land, Willard explores the shifts and tensions between ideas of the contemporary and the traditional. Willard centres art as an Indigenous resurgent act through her collaborative projects and her support of language revitalization efforts in Secwépemc communities. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land-based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard received an MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2018. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kamloops Art Gallery; Burnaby Art Gallery; and SFU Audain Gallery, Vancouver. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at FotoFocus Biennial; Cincinnati Arts Centre; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Germany; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; and Open Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre, Toronto. Willard has curated numerous exhibitions, including the traveling exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture that began at the Vancouver Art Gallery (co-curated with Kathleen Ritter); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology (co-curated with Karen Duffek); and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She was a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard was selected as one of five curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. She received the 2016 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, the 2020 Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award, and was named a 2022 Forge Project Fellow. Her work with BUSH gallery was recognized through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Future Studies award (2022). Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and Gallery Director at UBC Okanagan in Syilx territories (Kelowna, BC).