Pamela Klassen

Pamela Klassen is Professor of Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to Anthropology. Her current research focuses on religion, colonialism, treaties, and public memory in North America and Turtle Island, including a collaborative project on mounds and earthworks created and stewarded by Indigenous peoples around the Great Lakes and its rivers. She is also working on a book on the public memory of gold rushes in settler colonies. Her books include The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (U Chicago Press, 2018), Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (U Chicago Press, 2018), and Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (U California Press, 2011). Her public-facing work includes the digital storytelling project, “Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations” (storynations.utoronto.ca), a collaboration with her students and the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre of the Rainy River First Nations in Treaty #3 Territory. Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung lies on the north side of Manidoo Ziibi, also known as the Rainy River, which Canada and the United States consider to be a riverine border between Minnesota and Ontario. 

In 2022-23 she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair in the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Tübingen, where she also led a collaborative project, Religion and Public Memory, as holder of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and many years ago held a Fulbright Canada-US Fellowship as a graduate student.