The members of the BSC Awards & Fellowships Committee are pleased to announce that Oyeyemi Ifeoluwa Bamidele has been awarded the Marie Tremaine Fellowship for 2026.
Oyeyemi Ifeoluwa Bamidele is a Visiting Researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Her research focuses on bilingualism, language education, and immigrant language communities in Canada.
Her project, A Bibliography of Yoruba-Language Publishing in Canada, 2000–Present, is described below:
This project will create the first comprehensive list and detailed description of Yoruba-language books, newspapers, and other printed materials published in Canada from 2000 to today. Yoruba is one of Africa’s major languages, spoken by over 40 million people worldwide, with a rich literary history stretching back centuries. In Canada, Yoruba-speaking communities, primarily Nigerian immigrants, have established vibrant cultural presences in Toronto, Calgary, and other cities, complete with churches, cultural organizations, and heritage-language schools. Yet despite this active community life, no one has ever systematically tracked what these communities have published in their own language. There is no master list, no organized record of these publications. This gap matters because without documentation, Canada’s multicultural publishing history remains incomplete, and the ways immigrant communities maintain their languages and use print to preserve their identities remain poorly understood.
The goal of this project is to find, record, and describe every Yoruba-language publication produced in Canada that can be located. This includes books, pamphlets, community newspapers, language-teaching materials, religious texts like hymnals and prayer books, educational resources, and cultural event programs. The project will create a detailed catalogue with historical context explaining how, why, and by whom these materials were produced, who read them, and how they circulated. This catalogue will serve as a foundation for future researchers studying book history, immigrant communities, multilingual education, and the preservation of Canada’s diverse publishing traditions.
The study starts in 2000 because this marks a turning point when Nigerian immigration to Canada increased significantly and when Yoruba community institutions matured, churches became established, cultural associations organized formally, and heritage-language schools opened. Over the past 25 years, these communities have produced printed materials for worship services, teaching children Yoruba, celebrating cultural festivals, and maintaining connections to their heritage. However, these publications are scattered across community centres, church basements, private collections, and small bookstores. Many exist in small print runs and were never deposited in major libraries. Without systematic documentation, they risk being lost forever.
Research will take place in two settings. First, searches will be conducted at major Canadian libraries and archives including Library and Archives Canada, Toronto Public Library’s Special Collections, the Clara Thomas Archives at York University, and the Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Second, and critically, community-based research will involve visiting Yoruba churches that print their own hymnals and devotional materials, talking with cultural association leaders, visiting Nigerian bookstores in Toronto, and connecting with heritage-language schools. Many of these publications never make it into formal library collections, requiring direct engagement with the communities that produced them.
The project will analyse patterns in publishing: who publishes these materials, what topics they cover, how they are printed and distributed, and how communities use them. Documentation will capture how Yoruba Canadians have used print to preserve their cultural identity, teach their language to Canadian-born children, maintain religious traditions, and stay connected to Nigeria.
This project draws on my specialized training in bilingualism, African languages, and immigrant language development. Also, my direct knowledge of Yoruba language and culture enables reading and understanding these texts, not just cataloguing their physical characteristics. This linguistic competence allows for richer, more meaningful descriptions than would otherwise be possible.
This focused study of one language community will establish a research model that can be applied to other African-language communities in Canada, like Somali, Amharic, Igbo, and others. The project will result in both a scholarly article and a publicly accessible catalogue, making an important contribution to preserving and understanding Yoruba-language publishing in Canada.
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The members of the BSC Awards & Fellowships Committee are pleased to announce that Chris Lyons has been awarded the Bernard Amtmann Fellowship for 2026.
Chris Lyons was a rare books librarian at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine and Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University before retiring in 2024. His research interests and publications are in the fields of Canadian library history and collectors and collecting. He is currently interested in the history of the Canadian antiquarian book trade and sits on the boards of the Atwater Library and the Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus in Montreal.
His project, Collecting Canadiana: Lawrence Lande and the Boom in Historical Collecting in Post-War Canada, is described below:
The fifty years following the end of the Second World War saw the emergence of a powerful new Canadian nationalism. Canadians saw that their country had the ability to play a serious role on the international stage both in war and in peace. Leaving the shadows of a waning British Empire and wary of the potentially suffocating embrace of the United States, people sought to define, assert and celebrate what was uniquely Canadian. The celebration of the nation’s centennial in 1967 provided additional energy and urgency to this sentiment, as did the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. Politics, the arts, and educational curricula reflected this fascination with Canada’s past, present, and future.
This rise of Canadian nationalism had a tremendous impact on the book trade, private collecting, and acquisitions in academic and public libraries. The Canadiana collecting career of Montreal notary and businessman Lawrence Lande (1906-1996) provides an exceptionally rich and important case study of this period. Lande has been described as “one of the greatest private collectors of Canadian books and manuscripts.” Over the course of forty years, he created several significant collections of Canadiana. Lande worked closely with several Canadian booksellers, perhaps none more so than Austrian-born Montreal antiquarian book dealer Bernard Amtmann (1907-1979). Not long after his arrival in Canada in 1947 Dr Amtamm became a most passionate promoter of Canadiana, one whose impact on the Canadian book trade far surpassed acquiring and selling books. These two worked closely in forming Lande’s most significant Canadiana collections over the course of approximately twenty years.
Not being satisfied with merely amassing books, Lande believed that book collections must be used, lest they remain mere “ornaments of ostentation.” His solution was to make his collections accessible to scholars and students by donating or selling his collections to public institutions. McGill University’s principal H Rocke Roberston, university librarian Richard Pennington, and library director John Archer were instrumental in ensuring that McGill benefitted from Lande’s passion for Canadiana to build an exceptionally rich research collection. His first major Canadiana collection was donated to the McGill’s Redpath Library in 1965. This was followed by a second large collection of Canadiana in 1971, and smaller accumulations of material related to Indigenous and Inuit Peoples (originally designated the Lande Indian and Lande Eskimo collections). Other collections were sold or donated to Library and Archives Canada and elsewhere. In keeping with their donor’s wishes, McGill established a separate reading room with a dedicated librarian to serve the collection and its readers. Lande also issued several bibliographies of his collections to increase awareness of the printed history of Canada under the imprint of the Lawrence Lande Foundation for Canadian Historical Research which was housed in the library.
Using the rich archival sources available at McGill, Library and Archives Canada, and elsewhere, evidence of the collaboration of Lande, Amtmann, and McGill to create the Lande Canadiana collections provides a case study of the network of booksellers’, collectors, and libraries that can provide a basis for other studies of this era.