- Find UBC Alumni on:
UBC Alumni Affairs
Alumni Book Club
UBC Reads
Bringing volumes of intellectual stimulation to our alumni
The UBC Alumni Book Club is back this winter with two great selections. One is a gripping story about the lives of second-generation twenty-somethings in a modern, multicultural city. The other is a fascinating look at the role that Native American people played in the founding of Seattle.
Attend the Meet and Greet where you’ll meet your facilitator and learn a little about the selection you’ll be reading. Then, come to the book discussion and share your thoughts in a lively small group setting.
Event Details
Meet and Greet:
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
7:00 – 8:00 pm
Book Discussion:
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
7:00 – 9:00 pm
All Alumni Book Club events will take place in Cecil Green Park House (Main Floor), located at 6251 Cecil Green Park Road on the UBC Vancouver campus.
The cost is $10 per person. Please note that books will not be provided so you should make arrangements to obtain a copy in advance of the book discussion.
Light refreshments will be served.
Please RSVP online before Friday, March 2. If you have any questions, please contact us at alumni.association@ubc.ca or 604-822-3313.
The Selections
What We All Long For
By Dionne Brand
Facilitator: Sarah Banting, MA’04, PhD’10
What We All Long For follows a group of four young Torontonians as they carve out lives for themselves in the contemporary city. The children of immigrants and outsiders, they define themselves against the mainstream of whiteness and middle-class routine. But they love their city, and they inhabit it and the longings of its citizens with their artworks, their dreams, their graffiti and their wandering. Dionne Brand’s narration evokes the intimate collisions of strangers’ lives and the many languages of a multicultural city.
Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place
By Coll Thrush
Facilitator: Coll Thrush, PhD – Associate Professor of History, UBC Department of History
In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native.
While there are important differences between the histories of Seattle and Vancouver – which we will talk about in our discussion – similar processes were (and are) at work in both cities, and our hope is that this book will offer insights into local history and perhaps even change the way you see Vancouver.
Be sure to register early as space is limited. There is a limited amount of pay parking in the lot on Cecil Green Park Road and the closest parkade is the Rose Garden Parkade (for entry after 5:00 pm and on weekends, a flat rate of $6.00 applies).
Can’t get enough of the UBC Alumni Book Club? Want the literary conversations to continue throughout the year? Be sure to check out the Robson Reading Series at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Facilitator Biographies
Sarah Banting
Sarah received her PhD in English from UBC in 2010, where she is now teaching and doing research as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research pursues questions about how places are represented in Canadian literature—especially urban neighbourhoods, boundary-lines between familiar and unfamiliar places in Canadian cities, and pathways between rural and urban spaces. She is also interested in questions of writing, performance, and audience, and her doctoral research assessed which audiences are addressed by fiction and theatre set in Vancouver.
When not on campus at UBC, Sarah can be found going for a run, sipping coffee, or watching live theatre. She is proudly getting involved with the theatre and literary arts communities in Vancouver. In 2011, she worked with the staff of the BC Book Prizes, and she currently sits on the Board of Directors of Playwrights Theatre Centre, a dramaturgy and play-development centre of national importance.
Coll Thrush
A graduate of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University and the University of Washington, Coll Thrush formerly served as historian for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe in his hometown of Auburn, Washington. He is now associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he teaches Indigenous, environmental, cultural, and world history. He also serves on UBC’s research ethics board and as part of a faculty working group on Indigenous issues in the classroom.
Coll is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, which won the 2007 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography, and the article “City of the Changers: Indigenous People and the Transformation of Seattle’s Watersheds,” which was named Best Article of 2006 by the Urban History Association. He is also co-editor with anthropologist Colleen Boyd of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American History & Culture, forthcoming in early 2011 from the University of Nebraska Press, and has published on Northwest Coast topics ranging from seismology to food. He is currently working on two projects: London: Indigenous Histories of an Empire’s Centre, which examines urban history through the experiences of Indigenous travelers – willing or otherwise – from territories that became the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and a collection of essays entitled The Red Atlantic, co-edited with Cherokee literary scholar Jace Weaver.
Quick Links
Poll
Loading ...