Looking Back and Ahead: Exploring Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives - Debrecen University Symposium, 2024

Helga Katalin Pritz, a career diplomat, started working at the Africa Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after her graduation, then served at the embassies in Moscow and Nigeria. She was later appointed Deputy Head of Department for North Africa and the Mediterranean Union, later First Officer and then Interim Chargé d'Affaires at the Embassy of Hungary in Paris. She was Hungary's ambassador to Algeria and Mali for five years and is currently head of the Hungarian Consulate General in Montreal. The mother of two children, she speaks French, English and Russian.

Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski is the Lead Co-Director of Concordia's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and Associate Professor in the university's Department of History. She is the author of Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America (University of Manitoba Press, 2010) and has published several book chapters and articles on the history of migration, culture and transnationalism, including the  co-edited collection Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023). As both an oral historian and a teacher, Dr. Lorenzkowski seeks to examine the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways. Her current research project explores the ‘small spaces’ of childhood, children’s mobility in the wartime city, and children’s sensuous geographies in 1940s Atlantic Canada.

David Staines is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Formerly dean of the Faculty of Arts for eight years, he is internationally respected as a scholar of medieval literature and Canadian literature and culture. The author and/or editor of more than 20 books in these fields, he is also the translator of The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes. In 1998, he received the Lorne Pierce Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada, for outstanding contributions to Canadian criticism. In 2006, he published The Letters of Stephen Leacock, which was listed as one of the 100 best books of the year by the Globe and Mail. In 2011, he was invested into the Order of Ontario and into the Order of Canada. In 2021, he published A History of Canadian Fiction.

Anna Porter’s non-fiction books include Buying a Better World: George Soros and Billionaire Philanthropy, The Ghosts of Europe, winner of the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, Kasztner’s Train, the True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, winner of the 2007 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Award and of the Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction. She has also written six novels, a memoir, and numerous articles. Her most recent novel is Gull Island. Anna Porter is co-founder of Key Porter Books, a company with a wide-ranging  list that included Farley Mowat, Joan Barfoot, Fred Bruemmer, Norman Jewison, Hume Cronyn, George Jonas, Margaret Atwood, The Right Honourable Jean Chretien, Sylvia Fraser, Modris Eksteins, John Keegan, Martin Gilbert, Irving Abella, Josef Skvorecky, Italo Calvino, William Trevor, Conrad Black and Janet Lunn. She sold majority interest in the company in 2004. She is an Officer of The Order of Canada and has been awarded the Order of Ontario.

Endre Farkas is a poet, author and playwright living in Canada. He has published 13 books of poetry, 2 novels and had three plays produced. He has toured, read and performed across Canada, United States, Europe and South America. He has been an editor, publisher, one of the founders of Quebec Writers Federation and president of the Quebec English Language Publishers Association.

Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University. A student of politics and public policy, Professor Béland has published more than 20 books and 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and his work has been cited more than 16,000 times. In addition to his academic work, Professor Béland has participated in numerous training sessions for civil servants, provided policy advice to federal and provincial officials, and testified in front of the Saskatchewan Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission, Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, and the Standing Committee on Finance of the House of Commons (Canada). Moreover, he is very frequently asked to comment on key policy and political issues by Canadian and international media outlets.

Dennis Gruending is an Ottawa-based writer, a former Member of Parliament and author of the blogs Great Canadian Speeches and Pulpit and Politics.  He has worked as a print and television journalist, as a CBC Radio host, and has written or edited nine books. The most recent, released in June 2024, is A Communist for the RCMP: The Uncovered Story of a Social Movement Informant. He has produced two books about political speeches (Speeches That Changed Canada and Great Canadian Speeches). His book Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life, examined the growing competition between religious progressives and conservatives for power and influence in Canadian politics. He is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians.

Mélissa-Anne Ménard is an oral historian whose main research interests center on the history of childhood and emotions, stories of migration, and the production of archives. She first encountered oral history during an undergraduate seminar in childhood history. Mélissa-Anne holds a master’s degree in history from Concordia university, partially funded by a Concordia University Merit Scholarship. Her thesis explored the ethical and methodological ramifications of reusing archived oral history interviews conducted by other researchers to develop frameworks and protocols to allow us to engage with countless oral history collections that often lie dormant in archives.