The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Iris Wu has been awarded an Edward E. Hildebrand Research Fellowship for Summer 2026.
Iris is a PhD student in the Department of History. Her research overlaps the history of statistics, the history of technology, and environmental history. These interests have culminated in her current focus on the history of global aviation. In particular, she seeks to understand the construction of "global" kinds of knowledge infrastructure, epistemic communities, and the material infrastructures in the case of aviation. She is especially interested in the ideologies and measures of environmental governance and statistical risk calculus embedded within these structures, which continue to shape and govern collective and individual life today.
During her upcoming research trip to Whitehorse, Juneau, and Fairbanks, Iris will investigate a form of aviation central to the cultural and social landscapes of the Far North: bush flying. As a pilot herself, she hopes to understand the Arctic landscape as it is conceptualized and documented through the embodied vision of the pilot. She also seeks to understand the Indigenous knowledge and geographical pathways that informed pilots' practices. In addition, she examines the power dynamics and contestation of aerial sovereignty mediated through bush flying, pilots, including Indigenous pilots, the military, and Arctic communities. Ultimately, this project seeks to trace how local and Indigenous forms of knowledge were appropriated, militarized, and standardized into expansive knowledge frameworks that came to be understood as global aviation, while attending to the erasures of Indigenous knowledge pathways that accompanied this process.
Iris holds a BA in History from UC Berkeley.