The EU-Canada Study Tour and Internship Programme “Thinking Canada” offers students from European Union Member States a unique in-depth experience of Canada and of EU-Canada relations. This is achieved through an intensive four-week programme that begins in Brussels at the European Institutions and then moves to Canada, with study visits in Ottawa, Québec, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. Selected students remain in Canada to undertake internships in different institutions.

The Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship in North American Studies has been of enormous help to me during my current research project, Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border. Although I was fortunate to receive a year of teaching relief from my institution in 2011, this time would not have been as productive without the support of the fellowship and the access it afforded me to the British Library’s superb collection of materials relating to North American culture. My access to the British Library during this period provided me with the necessary research to complete three chapters of my monograph, my introduction, and to make important progress with my fourth chapter as well. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK providing access to such varied materials as a nineteenth-century edition of Anna Brownell Jameson’s North American travel narrative Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, Indigenous legal studies and scholarship on the impact of the Canadian Constitution on Indigenous groups, criticism on African-Canadian drama, and US-Mexico border studies. When I first devised my project, I did not quite anticipate the depth of specialised research that each of my chapters would require, and I have been incredibly fortunate that the British Library has met my research needs so thoroughly. Finally, the working space afforded by the British Library has been invaluable to my research and writing, including the rapid access to material as well as simply the quiet of the reading rooms which is so effective in facilitating scholarly endeavour. I am immensely grateful to the Eccles Centre for the Visiting Fellowship in North American Studies, and can say without hesitation that my period of the study at the British Library has been the most productive of my project as a whole.