Blog

The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada

Henria Aton
Archivist, The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada, Montréal

François Dansereau
Director, The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada, Montréal

Monday, 31 March 2025  |  online
9:00 EDT MONTRÉAL  ●  15:00 CET ROME  ●  18:30 IST GOA

The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada (AJC) holds archival records that testify to the diversity of activities of the Jesuits of Canada, from the seventeenth century to the present. This presentation will offer an overview of the collection as well as specific themes that emerge from its holdings, particularly in relation to the Jesuits’ missionary endeavours. It will spotlight records related to the Jesuits of Canada in South Asia, collections which are currently being processed and will therefore become available to researchers. The presentation will also discuss resources available to researchers as well as outreach initiatives to further connections with researchers and the public. Finally, it will comment on the relationship between the AJC and the Indigenous communities among whom the Jesuits lived and worked in Canada, in an era where anti-colonial archival work is at the heart of radical transformations in research practices.

Henria Aton is an archivist at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada and a PhD candidate in Information at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research examines personal and family archiving practices in post-war Sri Lanka. Her master’s thesis at McGill University focused on the French Jesuit New Madura Mission in nineteenth-century South India. Henria previously worked as an archivist for two Endangered Archives Programme projects (EAP835/971) in Sri Lanka.

François Dansereau is the Director of The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada, and a Course Lecturer at the McGill University School of Information Studies. His research focusses on colonial archives, archival description and re-description, and anticolonial archival access frameworks. He is the author of a few publications including the most recent titled “Archival Description, Land, Settler Colonialism, and World-Building in the Collection des archives du Collège Sainte-Marie”, written with co-authors Henria Aton and Kate Nugent, published in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Studies. François holds a Masters in History from Université de Montréal as well as a Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University.

• This seminar will be held ONLINE.
• Registration in necessary. Please register here.
• You will then receive a Microsoft Teams link to join the seminar.