The CHA is proud to announce the books that are shortlisted in this year’s Wallace K. Ferguson prize.
(In alphabetical order)
Doris L. Bergen, Between God and Hitler. Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Rowan Dorin, No Return : Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe, Princeton University Press, 2023.
Kyle Jackson, The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj. Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890-1920, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Kenneth Mouré, Marché Noir. The Economy of Survival in Second World War France, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
David C. Porter, Slaves of the Emperor. Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners, Columbia University Press, 2023.
Claire Thomson has received the 2024 Brian Long Best Doctoral Thesis in Canadian Studies Award for her 2022 University of Alberta thesis, “Digging Roots and Remembering Relatives: Lakota Kinship and Movement in the Great Northern Plains from the Wood Mountain Uplands across Lakóta Thamákhoche Lakota Country 1881-1940.” Awarded by the International Council for Canadian Studies, the Brian Long Award recognizes an excellent PhD thesis on a Canadian topic which contributes to outstanding scholarship on Canada.
We are delighted to announce that the CHA’s Graduate Students Representative Chris Aino Pihlak has been awarded the University of Victoria’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in the Humanities.
Her thesis, “A Movable Closet: Constructions of Femininity Among Twentieth Century Transfeminine Periodical Communities,” supervised by Rachel Cleves, is summarized by her nominators (Rachel and Thea Cacchioni) as “precisely written and theorized, thought-provoking, and ambitious,” examining conceptions of ‘proper’ femininity across US, Canadian and South African trans feminine networks from the 1960s through the 1990s.”I would like to thank the Faculty of Humanities for this award, and I want to emphasize its symbolic importance. Amidst a growing fascistic moral panic over trans women’s existence, for the Faculty to grant me this award is a powerful rebuke to those that think historical trans femmes did not exist, and that contemporary trans femmes like me should not exist.”
Chris Pihlak (History), recipient of the Gold Medal for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in the Humanities”.
Colin Coates (Glendon College, York University) has been awarded the 2024 Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies. The award recognizes the scholar who has made an outstanding contribution to scholarship and to the development of Canadian Studies internationally.
Professor Emeritus Peter Francis Neary in the History Department at Western passed away. See his obituary in the London Free Press.
We hosted our Eighth Annual Black History Month Lecture, this year given by Dr. Christopher Taylor, Associate VP of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Anti-Racism at the University of Waterloo, who gave an excellent presentation entitled, “Roots and Routes: Blackness Beyond May 25, 2020.”
Dr. Sean Kennedy published France and the World: The Career of André Siegfried (McGill-Queen’s, 2023), in which he uses the five-decade career of a political scientist and newspaper columnist to explore France’s changing role in the world, and the intersection between racist and republican ideas in the first half of the twentieth century.
Dr. Matthew Sears’ new book Sparta and the Commemoration of War (Cambridge University Press, 2024) examines how Spartans remembered their military victories, and their war dead, beginning in the seventh century BCE. It further examines why contemporary culture continues to use the image of the ‘tough Spartan soldier.’
Dr. Sasha Mullally (PI) was awarded a New Frontiers in Research Fund – Exploration Grant with her colleague Dr. Yun Zhang in Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering. Together, they have assembled an interdisciplinary team of social historians and geomatics engineers to create a large urban archive of historical aerial photographs. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), they will study urbanization and human settlement patterns over a century of visual data collected for the three cities of New Brunswick, beginning with Fredericton.
Arshad Suliman was named a Pierret Elliot Trudeau scholar in 2023. Arshad is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He completed his BA and MA in History, and obtained a Certificate in Black Canadian Studies at York University.
His doctoral project uses oral history methodology to explore the role of Black Canadians in transnational liberation movements in Southern Africa. This work builds on his Master’s research project which reviewed Black activism in late twentieth-century Canada.
Arshad is the son of an anti-apartheid Freedom Fighter and belongs to the Cape Coloureds ethnic group in South Africa. He identifies as a Black Canadian and is fluent in English, Afrikaans, and conversational Setswana.
Department of Indigenous Studies; Associate or Full Professor Tenured or Tenure-track.
Review of applications will begin April 5, 2024; however, applications will be accepted and evaluated until the position is filled. The anticipated start date is July 1, 2024.
On 25 May, the exhibition “Jackson’s Wars” will open at the McMichael Canadian Art Centre and run to January 2025. Sarah Milroy and I are curating the exhibition, which is based on my book Jackson’s Wars: A.Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). The exhibition includes works from the permanent collections of the McMichael, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Canadian War Museum, and several private collections.
“Jackson’s Wars: A.Y. Jackson before the Group of Seven is a rare examination of the work of painter Alexander Young (A.Y.) Jackson (1882–1974) in the decade before the Group of Seven’s formation in 1920. Curated by historian Douglas Hunter and Sarah Milroy, Jackson’s Wars will feature rarely seen paintings made during the artist’s trips abroad to study painting in Italy, Belgium, and France, as well as his evocative depictions of rural Quebec and Ontario made upon his return. Of particular note will be a handpicked selection of Jackson’s paintings made during the First World War depicting the devastation of the battlefields in France, which would have a lingering impact on his interpretations of the Canadian landscape. Jackson’s Wars: A.Y. Jackson before the Group of Seven provides an opportunity to reframe the legacy of one of Canada’s most significant artists.”
NEW PUBLICATIONS
Timothy Compeau, Dishonored Americans: The Political Death of Loyalists in Revolutionary America. University of Virginia Press, 2023.
Kimberley Moore & Janis Thiessen, mmm… Manitoba. The Stories Behind the Foods We Eat. University of Manitoba Press, 2023.