Speaking

Speaker Bio

Name pronunciation: Don-eek-ah Bell-aisle

Donica Belisle (she/her) is a settler historian who investigates corporate and government archives to recover the people and places behind Canadian prosperity. She is a Professor of History at the University of Regina and a settler Canadian of European descent living on Treaty 4 Territory. She is the author of Retail Nation (UBC Press, 2011) and Purchasing Power (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Her forthcoming book, Violence of Sugar, examines the connections between Canadian sugar refining and the atrocities inflicted on indentured people from India in colonial Fiji. 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.