THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
... consists of a dynamic group of active scholars and students engaged in cultivating knowledge and providing new appreciations of the past. Undergraduates are organized in the University of Guelph History Society, graduate students number more than forty active on campus at any one time, and postdoctoral scholars are integrated into the life of the Department.
History at Guelph offers undergraduate Honors majors and minors as well as an area of concentration to students in the General B.A. Program. The Department has also been providing high quality graduate instruction at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels for over four decades. Our graduates serve in diverse professions, with many employed at universities across Canada and around the world. Our faculty serves broad constituencies, but specializes in the social and cultural history of the transnational Atlantic world, its rural environments, and the migratory processes that have influenced identity formation and hybridity globally.
new in print
News
Alan Gordon: Amateur Historians Keep the Past Alive
Historical books, re-enactments and tourism capture public interest... By Teresa Pitman for @Guelph
The word “amateur” – meaning someone who engages in a pursuit for love, not money – often has negative connotations. A professional gets the job done right; an amateur may just be a bumbler. But history professor Alan Gordon is more positive about amateur historians than you might expect from someone who has made history his profession. “They play an important role in getting historical issues discussed and debated,” he says. Read the rest of the story @Guelph
Globe & Mail: Dr. Jacqueline Murray on the Recent Sex-Trade Worker Ruling
An opinion piece by history professor Jacqueline Murray about Monday’s Ontario Court of Appeal decision regarding sex-trade workers appears today in the Globe and Mail. Murray, the director of the First-Year Seminars program, is a medieval historian whose research focuses on sex, sexuality and gender. Her op-ed article discusses examines the history of the sex-trade industry and the legalization of brothels. The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that many sections of Canada’s criminal code violated the rights of sex-trade workers.
History Department Events at College Royal
Rural History at Guelph will present a series of informal talks at this year's College Royal: "Ontario’s Rural Heritage: Diaries & Detective Work." Explore rural history through farm diaries written over 100 years ago! Learn about daily life, hunting, courting, teatime, and family fun. Listen to students’ research or try deciphering 19th century handwriting! Presentations take place: Saturday, March 17 and Sunday, March 18 at 11:00 am and 2:00 pm in Rozanski Hall 102. Get the flyer (.pdf) http://www.collegeroyalsociety.com/ http://www.uoguelph.ca/ruralhistory/
To coincide with College Royale, the Department of History also presents Dr. Janet Golden: "Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome". Janet Golden is Professor of History at Rutgers University - Camden and is the author of A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Harvard University Press, 2005). She is currently working on a book on the history of babies. Visit http://dept.camden.rutgers.edu/jgolden Get the flyer: (.pdf)
College Royal is a University open house featuring campus research and teaching in agriculture and animal science. It's a family-day with lots for kids and interested members of the public to see. See you there!
History Student Keeps Scottish Weaver's Patterns Alive
by Andrew Vowles for @Guelph
Once a month, Deborah Livingston-Lowe leaves her Toronto Beaches home, heads to the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) and steps back into the Victorian era. As with other occasional OSC volunteers, she spends a day recreating patterns of a prominent 19th-century Ontario weaver on a massive, one-of-a-kind loom now owned by the science centre. But Livingston-Lowe has a deeper connection to the loom and its maker. This fall she began a master’s degree in U of G’s history department studying Scottish immigrant weaver John Campbell, who spent almost four decades near London, Ont., turning out Jacquard coverlets and rugs, blankets and flannel items on that loom. Besides highlighting his early work, her research will likely help correct a few romantic misconceptions and stereotypes about 19th-century lives, says her adviser, Prof. Catharine Wilson, a specialist in Canadian rural history.
Read the rest of the story @Guelph
