Historians’ Corner – June 2022

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NEWS

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.

Barry Cahill has completed his biography of Robert Winters and begun work on a biography of William Stevens Fielding.

York University is pleased to announce the following appointments:

Damilola Adebayo, BA (Ibadan), MA (Graduate Institute, HEID, Geneva), Phd (Cambridge): Assistant Professor, African History, 1 July 2021

Alan Corbiere, B.Sc. (Toronto), MES (York), PhD (York): Assistant Professor, CRC in Indigenous History of North America, 1 July 2020

Natasha Henry, BA (York), MA (York), PHD (ABD, York): Assistant Professor, African Canadian History, 1 July 2022

Paul Lawrie, BA (York), MA (Toronto), PhD (Toronto): Associate Professor, African American History, 1 July 2021

Abril Liberatori, Phd (York): Assistant Professor, Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies, 1 July 2020

Leila Pourtavaf, BA (McGill), MA (Toronto), PhD (Toronto): Assistant Professor, Middle East and Global Public History, 1 July 2020.

The David Alexander Prize – 2022 ($500)
The David Alexander Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on the history of Atlantic Canada written in a course by an undergraduate student in any university. The amount of the prize is currently set at $500. The deadline for submissions is June 15.

Dear Colleagues,
We would like to share the word about two new monographs produced by our history faculty in the past year:

Sara Z. MacDonald, University Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.
Mark Kuhlberg, Killing Bugs for Business and Beauty: Canada’s Aerial War Against Forest Pests, 1913-1930. University of Toronto Press, 2022.

The History Department at Western University welcomes Mitchell Hammond as a new faculty member.  Hammond specializes in the social and medical history of early modern Europe and the modern world. His research interests include the urban medical history of the German lands and the global history of epidemics. The Department of History at Western University has two books to announce.

Shelley McKellar, Transforming Dentistry: The Rise and Near Demise of Dentistry at Western University. University of Toronto Press (2022)
Alan MacEachern and Edward MacDonald, The Summer Trade: A History of Tourism on Prince Edward Island. McGill-Queen’s University Press (2022)

Dr. Stephanie Bangarth (King’s University College at Western University) and Dr. Jennifer Tunnicliffe (Toronto Metropolitan University) recently concluded a SSHRC-funded workshop titled “Revisiting Human Rights: A Workshop on the History of Human Rights in Canada.” This blended workshop was held on May 2-3 and featured the work of 21 scholars from Canada, Mexico, and the U.K. An edited collection and a special edition journal collection are the expected publication outcomes from this workshop, along with the creation of a sustained Human Rights History network. If you wish to be part of this network, please contact Stephanie Bangarth (sbangar@uwo.ca) and Jennifer Tunnicliffe (jtunnicliffe@ryerson.ca).

MANECCS Biennial Conference on Canadian Studies October 20-22, 2022
After a COVID two-year delay, we are excited to get back to the business of talking Canada! The Mid-Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies is currently accepting papers from all academic disciplines for its conference, to be held at the Marriott Fallsview in Niagara Falls, Ontario, October 20-22, 2022. Deadline for submissions is June 17, 2022. This year’s keynote speaker will be Dann Broyld, of UMass Lowell, who will speak on his new book Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery. Call for Papers.

The University of Guelph History Department will be welcoming two new tenure-track faculty members, who will be starting in their positions as of July 1.  Deirdre McCorkindale was hired for a joint position in Black Canadian History and the Black Canadian Studies minor.  Alex Souchen was hired for a joint position in History of Science and the Bachelor of Arts and Science Program.

Nipissing University, History Department
Dr. Katrina Srigley

The History Department congratulates our colleague Erin Dokis whose teaching excellence has been recognized with a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (CASBU), which will be awarded at Convocation ceremonies in June. Dokis has taught at Nipissing University (NU) for more than fifteen years, as a member of CASBU, in her roles in the Office of Indigenous Initiatives (OII), and importantly as a proud Nishnaabekwe from Dokis and Nipissing First Nations committed to giving back to her communities. In recognizing Dokis with the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the university honours her pedagogical contributions in and beyond this institution.

The department highlights, in particular, Dokis’ innovative work in our Summer Institute called Animating the Land: Nbisiing Nishnaabeg histories, which focuses on the histories of this territory and is taught in ways that honour Nishnaabeg ways of sharing, documenting, and mobilizing Nishnaabeg histories. This course has been recognized as a model for Indigenous pedagogies by Elders, administrators, our colleagues, and treaty partners. Every year Indigenous and non-Indigenous students acknowledge the course as “life changing”. Dokis has taught the summer institute four times to a range of students, including Indigenous community members. As a teacher in these courses, Dokis has contributed in exceptional ways to decolonizing and indigenizing our institution and discipline. In 2019, one student explained that Dokis and Elder John Sawyer provided “a true experience in reconciliation” for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and a learning environment where everyone “truly listened” to one another “using our ears/heads and our hearts!”.  The course will run this summer from August 8-18 at Nbisiing Secondary School and is open to community members. We are grateful for Erin Dokis’ work!

Erin Dokis with Elder John Sawyer and students from Animating the Land 2021, photograph courtesy of Brendan O’Connor, Nipissing University

As part of a ten-day workshop on Teaching Holocaust Photographs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dr. Hilary Earl has been invited to lead a methodology workshop on photography titled, “A Pedagogy of Witnessing Holocaust/atrocity Photographs”. Over the next year, Dr. Earl will lead the construction and launch of our CFI-funded Centre for the Study of War, Atrocity, and Genocide. We look forward to sharing news of its opening in future issues of the CHA digital newsletter. We wish our colleagues a productive and peaceful summer.

The CHPF is pleased to announce that we will be working on two digitization projects this summer.

Firstly, we are excited to be working with the Canadian National Exhibition Foundation on a year-long project titled Preserving the Legacy of the Canadian National Exhibition: Digitizing Photography from the Alexandra Studio Collection 1977-1979 with funding support from Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Heritage Communities Program. This project will assist with preserving, digitizing and disseminating over 8000 images from this amazing collection that are currently at risk. We are pleased to work with this important Foundation to preservation images of Canadian heritage.

The second project we will be working on is a digitization project funded in part by the Province of Manitoba that will see the digitization & preservation of over 1800 images of the province dated from the 1950’s to the 1980s by photographer George Hunter. Photographs of industry in Manitoba, as well as culture and early editorial work by Hunter will be available for the public to freely view on the CHPF’s Digital Collections website in the fall.

The history department has hired Dr. Daria Ho (East Asia) and Dr. Matthew Wiseman (North America) as three-year Definite Term Lecturers.

We are pleased to announce that we will be welcoming Dr. Beau Cleland to the department as an assistant professor on July 1.  Dr. Cleland specializes in the history of the United States. His research examines informal diplomacy and extralegal international violence in the U.S. Civil War era. In April we celebrated the distinguished career of Dr. Mark Konnert, an early modern French historian and former department head.  His retirement party also marked our first fully in-person event since Covid began.

Congratulations go out to Drs. Lyndsay Campbell and Nancy Janovicek who were both promoted to full professor commencing July 1, 2022. Additionally, it has just been announced that Dr. Janovicek will serve as the historical consultant for a series of essays in the Globe and Mail commemorating the Globe’s 180th anniversary.

Congratulations to Harvey Amani Whitfield on the publication of his Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

      

      

Elizabeth Galway, The Figure of the Child in WWI American, British, and Canadian Children’s Literature. Farmer, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Routledge, 2021.

Natalie Zemon Davis, Leo Africanus Discovers Comedy: Theatre and Poetry across the Mediterranean. CRRS Press, 2021.

Cecilia Morgan, “The Minister, the Bride and the School Girl: English Canadians in Europe, 1860s-1880s,” in Views on Europe: Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys, edited by Lilli Riettiens and Elke Kleinau.  Berlin//Boston: De Gruyter, 2022.  113-128.