Monday, September 24, 2012
Dr. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, University of Western Australia
Tuesday, October 9th
7 p.m.
Edmund Casey Hall, Room 103
In this public lecture, Dr. Leong-Salobir will employ the concept of ‘foodways’ to examine the emergence of colonial cuisine in India, Malaysia and Singapore. She will draw upon a wide array of sources, including cookbooks, household guides, colonial memoirs, diaries, and private correspondence, to trace the construction of a hybrid cuisine that took on dietary components of British culinary traditions and food practices from the colonies. The result was a distinctive colonial cuisine that can be seen as the precursor of fusion food. Indeed, this cuisine developed largely through the reliance of colonizers on their domestic servants. The lecture challenges current scholarship on colonial food history that contends that British colonists ate a totally different diet from the local people as a deliberate attempt to differentiate themselves from local populations. Instead, Leong-Salobir will argue that the colonial culinary experience was a fluid one, and that foods eaten by colonizers in each colony made geographical leaps to other colonies, in the process producing, with subtle regional differences, a pan-colonial cuisine.
The lecture is sponsored by the Anthropology, Sociology and History Departments at St. Thomas University and by the History Department at the University of New Brunswick.
This year, again, the History Department can recognise a slate of outstanding students for their academic achievements:
Chuddy McCarthy Memorial Prize for History in Fourth Year
** Christina Moss
Senator John J. Connolly Prize for History in Third Year
** Thomas F. Mackay-Boyce (a.k.a. Fin)
I.O.D.E. Prize for highest standing in Canadian History
** Michael Maloney
Desmond Prize for Medieval History
** Stephanie Violette
Dr. Tony Rhinelander Exploring History Prize
** Alexandra Fox
The department is also proud to recognize the achievements of our two Honours Thesis writers this year:
Christina Moss, “Women and Religious Authority and Influence in Sixteenth-Century Europe” Supervisor Dr Robin Vose; Reader Dr Gary Waite (UNB)
Susan Shurtleff, “The Ambiguous and Eclectic Career of Gandhi’s Satyagraha Amongst Indian Politicians and Practitioners c. 1890-1975”
Supervisor Dr Carey Watt; Reader Dr Rusty Bittermann
Professor Brad Cross, from the Department of History, will receive the John McKendy Memorial Teaching Award. Dr. Cross believes that his most successful courses are ones in which he draws attention to what the class, including himself, doesn’t know or might not be able to know. He and the students learn as a collective and through many non-traditional teaching techniques.
“I consider teaching to be a combination of preparation and response to the unexpected – teaching seems to be a dynamic process that continues to change with the work we are doing,” said Cross.
His students have studied historical artifacts at King’s Landing to learn about the past through material history. His travel-study courses to New York have provided rich learning opportunities that bring urban history to life and help broaden student’s knowledge and experience.
“His outside-the-classroom trips to study history have been as well orchestrated as his classroom sessions and have proven to be some of the greatest learning experiences of my time in university,” said a student who nominated Cross for the award.
“It was an honour to be nominated by students,” added Cross. “These students were subject to experimentation, experiential learning and hands-on approaches. They’ve been involved in research as well.”
<Campus News>
Dr. Michael Dawson will be awarded the inaugural St. Thomas University Early Career Research Award. He has become widely recognized in the fields of Canadian cultural history and Canadian historiography.
He was the recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council post-doctoral research fellowship and a Standard Research Grant, and he has received five St. Thomas University General Research Grants and three St. Thomas Research Course Releases, as well as a Conference Organizer’s Award.
Dawson’s successes are evidenced by his diverse scholarly publications as well as the various prizes, awards and research grants he has gained. He has also contributed greatly to student and faculty research at STU, and elsewhere, and shows strong leadership in the academic community. He has become a widely recognized player in Canadian Cultural History and Canadian Historiography, and has also proven himself time and again as a very talented researcher, writer, teacher and mentor.
<Campus News>
Monday, February 20, 2012
The History Department, the Science and Technology Studies Programme, the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the Department of Psychology are pleased to present a public lecture by Dr. Susanne Klausen of Carleton University.
The title of the lecture is:
“Sex, Shame and Suicide: The Criminalization of Trans-Racial Sex and the Disciplining of White Male Heterosexuality in South Africa during Apartheid, 1948-1990”
TIME/LOCATION: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 7 p.m. in Room 103, Edmund Casey Hall (St. Thomas University)
Dr. Klausen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University where she teaches African, South African and World History. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004) and has written extensively on the comparative history of eugenics, abortion and birth control.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
WHEN: Monday 20 February, 9am
WHERE: Faculty Lounge in ECH 201
Faculty and current Honours students will be on hand to provide an overview of the upcoming Senior Seminars and to discuss the Honours Programme.
Refreshments will be provided
Thursday, January 26, 2012
This year, four faculty members of the History Department have received research grants from the Research Office, including the Major Research Grant awarded to Dr. Jennifer Lofkrantz for her project “Scholars, Captives, and Slaves: The Intellectual Debate on Ransoming Prisoners in Muslim West Africa.”
The other recipients are:
Dr. Bradley Cross for “After the Bauxite is Gone: A History of Land Rehabilitation Schemes in Transnational Context”
Dr. Michael Dawson for “A Canadian Girl in South Africa: Gender, Imperialism and Education During the Boer War”
Dr. Karen Robert for “Fordism’s Promise and Perils: An Analysis of Ford Motors Operations in Argentina, 1960s – 1980s”
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
The Global and International Studies Initiative at STU awarded three of its four Research Grants to Dr. Brad Cross, Dr. Jennifer Lofkrantz and Dr. Robin Vose.
On 21 October, Dr. Carey Watt delighted his colleagues and other guests with wits and good humour, as he presented his latest edited book on “civilizing missions” in South Asia.
Lee Benson obtained her Honours Degree in History in 2011, and was awarded a SSHRC Masters Scholarship to attend Carleton University. She will be starting graduate school there in September 2012 with a well-developed research project. This is the update Lee has sent us:
“I’ll be continuing a project I began at Saint Thomas regarding the history of the automobile. My project at Saint Thomas was an examination of the use of industrial film in the Automobile industry from 1930 – 55, focusing on films used for advertising. My hope is to continue that project and expand it to include a comparison of the advertising employed by GM and that of the Ford Motor company. Ford created its own advertisements and GM used an advertising company. GM’s car ads fit very well within broader trends in American advertising culture at the period and my preliminary hypothesis at this point – given what I know of the Ford Motor Company in this period – is that Ford’s ads will be very different. I want to do a comparison of the cultural values that were promoted by each companies advertising and how that relates to broader trends in automobile culture. We’ll see how far I get with that. I may have to save part of that for my next degree and just take it a little piece at a time, especially given how little literature has been written on industrial film advertising.
I’m really looking forward to this project as my first two years at Saint Thomas were spent in the journalism program. Continuing with a project so focused on media allows me to tie my passion for history and my passion for journalism and communications together. Carleton is a great place to do that, although I know I never would have gotten here if it hadn’t been for the time I spent working with STU’s history professors. I wouldn’t have even attempted it. I appreciate all that you and others have done to help get me here and I wish you all the best this fall!”
Essay abstract: “Advertising in Motion: The Use of Industrial films in American Automobile Advertising, 1930 – 55”
