We have hired a new colleague: Dr. Angela Tozer, PhD McGill 2020, Canadian Indigenous and Environmental history. Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for The Slave Law Project, a digital archive of British Atlantic slave laws 1636-1838. Dr. Gary Waite was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. We have lost two colleagues to retirement (Drs. Marc Milner and Bill Parenteau), and one to another university (Dr. Funke Aladejebi) this year.
Building on the success of their 2019 conference, the Lethbridge Border Studies Group is organizing an online conference in June 2021 with the theme “The Line Crossed Us: New Directions in Critical Border Studies”. See the CFP at our website https://www.lethbridgeborderstudies.com/.
On Sept 17, 2020 University of Lethbridge’s Centre for Oral History and Tradition (COHT) hosted an online event Indigenous Histories in Contemporary Times featuring Dr. Lianne Leddy (Anishinaabe Kwe) and Dr. Tiffany Prete (Kainaiwa/Blood). We were honored to have Francis First Charger Ninnaisipistoo (Owl Chief) open the event with a blessing. Dr. Lianne C. Leddy, an Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, is the author of Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium at Elliot Lake (UTP forthcoming) in addition to articles in Oral History Forum, the Canadian Historical Review, Herizons, and several edited collections. Aapo’yakii/Dr. Tiffany Prete is a member of the Siksikasitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy). She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. Her postdoctoral work is comprised of implementing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action on the Blood Reserve. Her essay “Beadworking as Indigenous Research Paradigm” may be found at https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ari/index.php/ari/article/view/29419.
Valerie Korinek was named to the Royal Society of Canada https://news.usask.ca/media-release-pages/2020/three-usask-female-faculty-members-honored-by-the-royal-society-of-canada.php.
Call for Papers – Collection A History of the British World: New Voices and Perspectives edited by Jatinder Mann and Iain Johnston-White.
The Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Students Network (ACNZSN) is very excited to announce the launch of a Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies (JACANZS). It is a peer-reviewed, online, open access journal. JACANZS adopts a multi and interdisciplinary perspective. A special call for papers for its inaugural issue will be issued soon. For more information on the journal see: https://acnzsn.org/journal/. The deadline for submissions is 30 November 2020.
The Okanagan College History Department has moved online as a result of the pandemic. We are delivering our courses via Collaborate and our enrollment levels have held up fairly well.
On quite a positive note, Professor Howard Hisdal will be offering the department’s first upper-level course in the winter semester, a course on the history of capitalism intended for business students. We are also in the process of gaining approval for a second upper-level course covering the history of Canadian legal traditions, which will be directed primarily at Criminology students.
Dr. Kristen Bos has joined the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga as Assistant Professor, and she continues her role as Co-Director of the Indigenous-led Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. Dr. Bos is an Indigenous feminist researcher concerned with the relationship between colonial, gendered, and environmental violence. She is urban Métis based in Toronto, but her homeland is northern Alberta where prairie transitions into boreal forest.
Raymond B. Blake’s Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland’s Rocky Road to Canada, co-authored with Melvin Baker at Memorial University and published in 2019 by the University of Regina Press, was recently awarded the Pierre Savard Award from the International Council of Canadian Studies that is designed to recognize and promote each year outstanding scholarly monographs on a Canadian topic. The book was also named to The Hill Times’ List of 100 Best Non-Fiction Canadian Books in 2019, shortlisted for the Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador (HSA) for the Heritage and History Book Award that recognizes outstanding work of non-fiction published in 2018 or 2019 that enrich knowledge in the history and heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador, and a Finalist for the 2020 Canada Prizes in the Humanities and Social Sciences by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Raymond B. Blake was recently awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant with Dr. Penny Bryden at the University of Victoria for “The Power of Ideas: National Identity and Pierre Trudeau’s Peace Initiative”. Among his recent publications are “Citizenship, National Identity, and the Search for Stability in Canada,” AUC Studia Territorialia, 19, no. 2, (2019): 11-38; « La diversité et le sentiment d’appartenance au Canada » in Le sentiment d’appartenance aux Amériques. Marie Michaud & Mariannick Guennec (coord.). Éditions du Cygne, Paris, 2019; and « Terre-Neuve et le Canada : la quête de stabilité » in La Confédération, 1864-1999: nouvelles perspectives. D. Heidt, ed., avec C. M. Coates. Calgary: U of Calgary Press, 2019: 253-80. He is also returning from a sabbatical leave at University College Dublin in Ireland where he was the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies.
Jason Colby is the incoming Chair. Jordan Stanger-Ross received the Faculty’s Humanities Research Award & The Provost’s Engaged Scholar Award for 2019. Rachel Cleves was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Karen Hickton retired.
Dr. Sarah Nickel joined our department as Associate Professor on September 1, 2020, from the University of Saskatchewan. Dr. Nickel won the CHA’s Indigenous History Book Prize for 2020, for her book Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019). Her coming further strengthens the department’s research, teaching and supervisory capacity in Indigenous history and Western Canadian history.
Congratulations are due to Dr. David Mills, retired faculty member in History, and his co-authors Jay Scherer and Linda Sloan McCulloch, whose recent book Power Play: Professional Hockey and the Politics of Urban Development has been named Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. The book is “an absorbing account of the machinations that got [Rogers Place in Edmonton] and the adjacent Ice District built, with a price tag of more than $600 million. The arena deal, they argue, established a costly public financing precedent that people across North America should watch closely, as many cities consider building sports facilities for professional teams or international competitions. Their analysis brings clarity and nuance to a case shrouded in secrecy and understood by few besides political and business insiders.”
The department is offering dedicated MA funding (two spots) in Western Canadian history in connection with a SSHRC research project, “Mining, clearing, and reclaiming the Rocky Mountains and foothills, 1947-2018,” (PI Dr. L. Piper). Expressions of interest should go to Dr. Piper by November 30. See the department website for details. This is in addition to our regular-stream graduate funding.
Publications
Mitch Hammond, Epidemics and the Modern World. UTP, 2020.
Sarah Carter and Nanci Langford, eds., Compelled to Act: Histories of Women’s Activism in Western Canada. University of Manitoba Press, 2020. Please join us for the launch of this book on Oct. 20th. Here’s the zoom registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9416002904499/WN_33TfOPKQle1Me3RCfI4_Q.
Sarah Carter, Ours By Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces. University of British Columbia Press, 2020. (5th book in the series edited by Veronica Strong-Boag, Women’s Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy.
Barry Cahill, Rebuilding Halifax: A History of the Halifax Relief Commission. James Lorimer & Co., 2020.
Whose workspace is this? Send your answers to Michel Duquet by 15 October with “office” in the subject line; a winner will be drawn from among those who answer correctly. The winner will receive a $50 discount on their 2021 CHA membership.
Nobody guessed that the owner of the Mystery Desk in the last issue was David B. Marshall, Department of History, University of Calgary.