Laurie Bertram’s research explores the relationship between popular cultural and familial memories of trauma in the Icelandic Canadian community and official representations of the immigrant past in the Centennial and Multicultural era.
Through an exploration of material culture, space, public commemoration and oral history, she is particularly interested in popular narratives of maternal loss, the transformation of the immigrant trunk into both a national symbol and a container for intergenerational memory, and the relationship between migration and colonialism.