Dr. Jeffrey Brison is Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. An affiliate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) and a former Deputy-Senior Editor of McGill-Queen’s University Press, his work focuses on Canadian American relations, cultural philanthropy, and the history of cultural policy in Canada and the United States. He is author of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the “Arts and Letters in Canada,” a study that explores the influence of private American philanthropy on the making of a national culture in Canada. His current book project, co-authored with Lynda Jessup, places the history of Canada’s nationalist art narrative in conversation with other art histories in circulation internationally over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on representative exhibitions of Canadian art, the study examines the role of nationalist art histories in advancing international relations in the twentieth century and globalizing dynamics in the twenty-first.  

A founding member of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI), Dr. Brison is working with colleagues from across North America, Turtle Island, and beyond to develop a field of research and practice at the intersection of disciplinary cultural history, cultural studies, and international relations. NACDI’s aim is to foster a vibrant research network that advances cultural diplomacy as critical study and practice, generates new research, trains graduate students and practitioners to create effective initiatives and linkages, and engages in outreach with scholarly communities and broader publics. As part of the project, in 2018, Dr. Brison co-authored “Cultural Diplomacy and Trade: Making Connections,” a technical report prepared for the Copyright and International Trade Branch of the Department of Canadian Heritage and in February of this year, co-edited “Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice: The Report,” a study that emerged from NACDI’S first research summit, held virtually in September 2020. In the virtual Global Humanities Symposium: Observing Cultural Diplomacy, Dr. Brison and his research partner Dr. Sarah EK Smith are presenting their study “The Global Engagement of Museums in Canada” – a report providing baseline data and qualitative analysis of ten Canadian museums’ global activities between 2009 and 2019.