Cameron Tardif

Overview

I am a PhD candidate working on twentieth-century United States and Canadian history. I work at the intersection of social, political, and cultural history, and focus on sport as a space where race, power, and citizenship are constructed and contested. 

Committee: Lawrence Glickman (Chair), Jon Parmenter, Tamika Nunley, Ruth Lawlor

Research Focus

My dissertation, “Chasing Canaan: The United States, Canada, and the Quest for an Athletic Promised Land,” is a social history of the U.S.-Canada border that links global migration with sport to unsettle long-standing narratives that contrast American racial violence with the putative racial egalitarianism of Canadian politics. Through four case studies – Indigenous Canadian lacrosse players at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, amateur Japanese baseball in the Pacific Northwest, Jackie Robinson’s portrayal of amicable race relations in Montreal, and interracial baseball in the prairies and plains of the Midwest – I advance a new multiracial and transnational history of how the boundary line was a contested global terrain marked by battles around the meanings and practices of citizenship. 

Based on archival research from across the U.S. and Canada, my dissertation draws on sources seldom used in sport histories, including federal documents, immigration records, ship manifests, photographs, private correspondence, French and English language newspapers, oral histories, and the records of community organizations, universities, and churches.  By mapping the transborder social worlds of these disparate groups, I argue that between the 1880s and 1960s, the meanings of the US-Canada border were constantly reconstructed through the social and political interactions of border-crossers. Today’s border is therefore the product not merely of the state’s power to demarcate national territory, but also of the relationships forged along it by boundary-crossers who often had different ideas about the rigidity of national frameworks. 

My research, writing, and teaching received support from several programs and offices at Cornell including the History Department, Graduate School, and Knight Writing Institute, as well as by the North American Society for Sport History, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2023 I received the Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 and Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants from Cornell’s College of Arts and Science. In the spring of 2023, I taught the freshman writing seminar “Reading the Past: United States History through Novels.” In fall 2026, I will be teaching “More Than a Game: Sports and Politics in Modern America.”