Donica Belisle

Speaking

For enquiries, please be in touch.

Speaker Bio

Name pronunciation: Don-eek-ah Bell-aisle

Donica Belisle (she/her) is a historian of Canadian capitalism, colonialism, gender, and labour. She studies how economies, corporations, and governments have shaped people’s lives, and how people have responded. She is a Professor of History at the University of Regina and a Canadian of European descent living in Treaty 4 Territory. She is the author of the award-winning books Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (UBC Press, 2011) and Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Her forthcoming book, Indenture and Canadian Sugar in Fiji: Power and Profit across the Pacific, addresses the histories of indenture, colonization, B.C. Sugar, and the Vancouver-Fiji Sugar Company. She received the Canadian Historical Association Teaching Prize in 2025.

Sugar & Empire

  • 2026
    “Rethinking Empire: Sugar and Dispossession at Home and Abroad.”
    University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities Guest Lecture Series, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB. 20 January 2026.
  • 2025
    “Indian Indenture and Canadian Violence in Colonial Fiji.”
    With Rizwaan Abbas. Invited Lecture. Montreal History Group May Day Conference, York University, Toronto, ON. 4–6 June 2025.
  • 2023
    “Canadian Sugar and Indenture – Local and Global Stories.”
    Invited Lecture. School of Law and Social Sciences Seminar Series, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji. 5 June 2023.
  • 2023
    “Documenting Girmit in Navua, Fiji.”
    Celebrating Girmitiya Identities and Lives: Documenting, Researching, Writing, and Communicating Histories and Lives Conference. University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji. 12–15 May 2023.
  • 2023
    “Imperial Capitalism in the Pacific: Canadian Sugar’s Departure From Fiji.”
    Business History Conference. Detroit, MI. 16–18 March 2023.
  • 2022
    “Growing Canadian Sugar: Indenture in Fiji and the Building of a Transpacific Sugar Empire.”
    North American British Studies Annual Conference. Chicago, IL. 10–13 November 2022.
  • 2021
    “White Sugar: Erasing Global Labour in Settler Canadian Food Marketing.”
    Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics Workshop, University of California–Santa Barbara. Online. 21–23 May 2021.
  • 2020
    “Sugar in Settler Colonial Culture in Canada: What Home-Ec Cookbooks Reveal.”
    With Daylene Sliz. University of Regina, Regina, SK. 26 August 2020. Online.
  • 2019
    “From Medicine to Toxin: Global History of Sugar.”
    Regina Public Library, Central Branch. 25 April 2019.

Retail, Consumption & Gender

  • 2020
    “Whiteness in Canadian Consumer Culture.”
    Living Heritage Research Cluster Sharing Series, University of Regina, Regina, SK. 27 May 2020. Online.
  • 2017
    “When Women Went to War: Western Canadian Women and World War I.”
    Convenor, with Dr. Katrina Ackerman and Honours Students Kiera Mitchell and Jacqueline Wagner. Regina Central Public Library. 7 March 2017.
  • 2016
    “Becoming Consumer Citizens: Femininity and Democracy in a Settler Nation.”
    Western Association of Women Historians Annual Conference, Denver, CO. 12–14 May 2016.
  • 2016
    “I’m Not a Feminist But . . . : A Brief History of Canadian Women’s Activism.”
    Faculty of Arts Open Minds Series, University of Regina. 20 January 2016.
  • 2013
    “Buyers of the Nation: Women and Consumer Citizenship.”
    Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative Conference, Clark University, Worcester, MA. 12–14 June 2013.
  • 2012
    “Professionalizing Consumption: The National Council of Women of Canada, 1893–1939.”
    Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 9–12 June 2012.
  • 2010
    “Greedy and Gullible: Representations of Female Shoppers in Canada.”
    Inventing and Re-Inventing the Gendered Consumer from the Modern to Postmodern Periods, University of Limerick, Ireland. 21–22 May 2010.