Historians’ Corner – August 2022

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NEWS

 

Donald Smith (University of Calgary) has won the 2022 John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize for Seen but Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today (UTP, 2021). The jury described his book as “timely and accessible” and as “a sparkling capstone to a lifetime of impressive historical work.” Seen but Not Seen examines the views of sixteen Canadians – from Sir John A. Macdonald, Duncan Campbell Scott, Crowfoot and Long Lance to Emily Carr, Pauline Johnson and Harold Cardinal – to reveal the range of attitudes about First Nations people in Canada. The Dafoe Prize is valued at $10,000.

 

 

 

Barry Cahill’s biography of Norman McLeod Rogers has been accepted for publication. He is now working on a biography of William Stevens Fielding.

 

 

 

Jordan Stanger-Ross and Eric Adams have been awarded the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History for their work on the internment and dispossession of Japanese Canadians.

Jordan Stanger-Ross and Lynne Marks have been awarded the Switzer-Cooperstock Prize for their essay, “Remembering the Holocaust in a Settler City: The Case of Victoria, Canada.” This prize, from the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, recognizes writings on Jewish history in Western Canada.

 

 

 

Register here

 

 

 

The Donna Coates Book Prize is awarded by the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Studies Network to a monograph published by an Early Career Researcher. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2022. Further details of the prize here.

 

 

 

The Ontario Historical Society is very pleased to announce that *individual* digital subscriptions to Ontario History journal are now available on Érudit. Individuals may subscribe at https://ontariohistoricalsociety.ca/ontario-history-journal/.

Ontario History is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that is published bi-annually by the Ontario Historical Society. Ontario’s premier history journal, it discusses a wide variety of topics relating to the province’s past.

 

 

 

Douglas Hunter (PhD, History, York University 2015; postdoctoral fellow, University of Waterloo, 2015-17) has published his third book with a leading academic press since completing his doctoral studies. Jackson’s Wars: A.Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, May 2022 as part of the McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Foundation Studies in Art History Series. McGill-Queen’s previously published Dr. Hunter’s Beardmore: The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History (2018).

As well, University of North Carolina Press has released in paperback The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past. Based on his doctoral dissertation “Stone of Power,” which won the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies Prize as the top dissertation in humanities, social sciences and art history in 2016, “Stone of Power” was published in hardcover by UNC Press in 2017. Dr. Hunter continues to work as an independent researcher and writer.

 

 

There has been plenty of activity among historians at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Mark McGowan has stepped down as interim Principal & Vice-President and is now on a year’s research leave. Nick Terpstra, former Chair of the U of T Department of History has been named Interim Principal of St. Michaels for the remainder of 2022. Giulio Silano has completed his research leave and has resumed his duties teaching Mediaeval History. David Wilson teaches Irish and Canadian history and continues his secondment to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, as its General Editor. David launched his new book, Canadian Spy Story(MQUP) in June. St. Mike’s has also added two historians to its roster of Visiting Fellows. John Meehan, SJ, is Director of the William Graham Centre for International Relations, and will be teaching a course in the Department of History, across Queen’s Park at U of T. Jacqueline Murray has also joined us and will be serving in the Mediaeval Studies Program. Our Junior Fellows Program is in its second year and includes Nicholas Baker (ABD), a doctoral candidate from the U of T Department of History.

The History Department at Western University welcomes Associate Professor Ruramisai Charumbira as a new faculty member.  Charumbira is a cultural historian of Africa, with a research focus on Southern Africa. She is an advocate of an engaged and embodied public humanities and social sciences. And among others, she is an active member of the Memory Studies Association.

 

Wilfrid Laurier’s Kevin Spooner has been awarded WLU’s Donald F. Morgenson Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Spooner has consistently put student-centred learning at the heart of his teaching. Wilfrid Laurier PhD candidate Eric Story has received a Laurier Student Award for Excellence in Teaching. Eric is also the winner of the Canadian Historical Review’s Best Article Prize in 2022 for his article – « The Indigenous Casualties of War: Disability, Death, and the Racialized Politics of Pensions, 1914-39 ». Volume 102, issue 2, pp. 279-304.

 

Paul Romney’s book Epics of Disaffection: The Dissenting Histories of Tolkien, Tolstoy, and E. P. Thompson is now available. An exploration of the epic imagination, it brings a historian’s sensibility and expertise to bear on four eccentric works of genius, each of a different genre, which underwent a metamorphosis in the course of composition, emerging as an account of a historical crisis set in a broader temporal context. Each acquired an epic theme, tone and structure, becoming a narrative that contemplates human experience in the light not just of history but of eternity. The narratives are dissenting histories because the epic transformation was triggered in each case by a prophetic urge arising from the author’s profound alienation from modernity and sense of being at the mercy of history.

 

 

 

Awards:

Four faculty members in the Queen’s University Department of History received SSHRC Insight Grants in the 2022 competition:

• Marc Epprecht, “Futures of Care: Community Challenges to Extraction in South Africa and Canada” (co-applicant).
• Laila Haidarali, “Beauty and ‘The Unfinished Business of Democracy’: Black Women, Fashion, and Modelling, 1945-1955.”
• David Parker, “Policymaking in the Mirror: Global Knowledge, National Image, and the ‘Social Question’ in South America, 1889-1943.”
• Awet Weldemichael, “Somalia after Piracy: The Political Economy of Maritime Resource Conflict in the Western Indian Ocean.”

Scott Berthelette received a Queen’s University Principal’s Impact Course award to develop his new proposed course Turtle Island Speaks: What Geography, History, and Ecology Tells us about Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Histories of Eastern Ontario. Read more about Dr. Berthelette’s course here.

Daniel McNeil (cross-appointed) is the 2022 winner of the Canadian Journal of Communication Editor’s Award for his article “Even Canadians Find It a Bit Boring: A Report on the Banality of Multiculturalism.”

Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), edited by Yana Meerzon, David Dean and Daniel McNeil, received an honourable mention for the Canadian Association of Theatre Research’s 2022 Patrick O’Neill Award.

Recent Publications:

Scott Berthelette has published a new book, Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Richard Greenfield has published a new co-edited and translated volume, Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean: The Eugenian Recension of Stephanites and Ichnelates (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2022)

David Parker has published a new book, The Pen, the Sword, and the Law: Dueling and Democracy in Uruguay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Appointments:

Amitava Chowdhury has been appointed Chair of the Department of History for a 5-year term. He is a historian and historical archaeologist of agrarian labour regimes and colonial plantations in the British Caribbean and the Indian Ocean and is interested in the meaning and theory of Global History and diaspora theories. He is a former Fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. He is a Director of the Global History Initiative at Queen’s University.

This summer, the Department welcomes two new postdoctoral fellows. Amy Fedeski is the new Alfred and Isabel Bader Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History. Amy’s scholarship stands at the intersection of American Jewish History, migration and refugee history, and twentieth century international history. Her dissertation is entitled “’What we want to do as Americans’: Jewish Political Activism and United States Refugee Policy, 1965-1989.” Megan Welton is the new Marjorie McLean Oliver Postdoctoral Fellow. Megan is in the process of completing a book manuscript, based on her dissertation, entitled Crowned with Virtue: Political Discourse and Ruling Women in Tenth-Century Europe. At Queen’s, she plans to commence a new project titled Trials of Virtue: Crisis and Communities in the Early Medieval World, c.400-c.1100.

Congratulations to Dr. Eric Fillion (Buchanan Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct Professor), who received a SSHRC Connection Grant for “Curating for Change: The Work That Music Festivals Do in the World.” This grant provides funding for a two-part online conference that will take place on August 26-28 and October 14-15, 2022. This conference will bring together scholars, practitioners, artists, organizers, and patrons in the realm of music-making to reflect on the work that independent, artist-run, or boutique music festivals do in promoting vital forms of activist arts-based practices and pedagogies.  Dr. Fillion (Principal Investigator) received the grant with project collaborator and co-applicant Dr. Ajay Heble (Director, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and Professor, School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph). See the full schedule and other details on the conference website. Register on Eventbrite.

 

 

Although professor emeritus Brian Tennyson retired some years ago, he still teaches part-time and is entering his 56th year at Cape Breton University. He continues writing and publishing as well.

 

 

Dr. Carolyn Willekes has published the following book chapters:

“Cavalry Battle in Greece and the Hellenistic East,” in the Blackwell Companion to Greek Warfare. W. Heckel et al, eds. (Blackwell, 2021).

“Feminizing the Hippodrome: Finding the Female in a Male World,” in Historical Practices in Horsemanship and Equestrian Sport. A. Ropa and T. Dawson, eds. (Trivent, 2022).

 

The Government of Canada and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation announce the new National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials.

 

Ancestors: Indigenous Peoples of Western Canada in Historic Photographs by Sarah Carter and Inez Lightning (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press and Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, 2021) won the Margaret McWilliams Award in Manitoba History in the category of Popular History, and is a finalist for a High Plains Book Award in the category of women writers.

 

 

 

John Campbell Cairns passed away on 28 July 2022.

 

 

 

The Department of History, the Tri-University Graduate Program, and the University of Guelph community are all deeply saddened by the death of Professor Alan Gordon, who passed away on the morning of July 25, 2022.  Alan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February 2021; nevertheless, he continued to be a source of good humour, friendship and insightful advice, all the while continuing to work away at his own research and mentor his graduate students. His passing leaves a huge hole in our hearts.

 

The Dalhousie Department of History is sorry to relay the news of David Sutherland‘s death on 10 July. David was several times chair of the department, past president of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, a prolific graduate supervisor, and both a respected and popular undergraduate teacher for many years. Author of works on the Halifax Explosion and co-author (with Judith Fingard and Janet Guildford) of Halifax: The First 250 Years, David was also a frequent contributor to Acadiensis, the Canadian Dictionary of National Biography, work on historic monuments, and much more. He is already missed. We offer our condolences to his family and friends.

 

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

    

  

Jatinder Mann & Iain Johnston-White, Revisiting the British World: New Voices and Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2022.

Cecilia Morgan, “Gender and Tourism in the (Very) Long Nineteenth Century,” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Tourism and Travel, Edited by Eric Zuelow and Kevin J. James. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.  Online, 1-16.

Lorraine O’Donnell & Patrick Donovan, People’s History of English-Speaking Quebec. A Community-Based History Project for the Vitality of an Official Language Minority. QUESCREN, 2022.

Ian Milligan, The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Carol Payne, Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster and Christina Williamson, eds. Atiqput: Inuit Oral History and Project Naming. MQUP, 2022.