College News

This year's winner of the J. W. Skinner Medal is recent graduate Steven Rai. The medal is the most prestigious University Convocation award for an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph and is awarded by the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences to a student for exceptional achievement in both academic and extracurricular activities.

Steven is an International Development major who has taken many courses with the Department. He is also familiar to the History Department through his fine work on the 1861 Census Project and the People in Motion research team, supervised by Drs. Kris Inwood and J. Andrew Ross. Congratulations from all of us!

We recently received the excellent news that Dr. Andrew Ross, who has served as a postdoctoral fellow in our Department for many years, has accepted a job with Disposition and Discoverability Task Force at Library and Archives Canada. We all congratulate Andrew and wish him well at his new appointment in Ottawa.

Andrew, we will miss you!

Rural History at Guelph is proud to host the Artifacts in Agraria Symposium October 17 and 18, sponsored by the Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professorship in Rural History.

Join historians, archaeologists, sociologists and museum professionals from across North America as they explore the material artifacts of everyday life. Observe how these historical sources gather meaning when understood in the context of surviving written records, family history and international commerce. Join the discussion on how artifacts reflect aesthetic and cultural beliefs, symbolize self-identity, affirm values, tell stories, purvey heritage and change meaning over time. Celebrate the new methods and ways of viewing artifacts that deepen our understanding of rural life.

Admission is free when you register before August 3rd, contact Jodey Nurse - jnurse@uoguelph.ca
For more information contact Dr. Catharine Wilson - cawilson@uoguelph.ca or visit Rural History

Get the final schedule .pdf        Get the poster .pdf

This week, Dr. Susan Nance's research on historical circus elephants is featured on the Research Matters blog, sponsored by the Council of Ontario Universities.

After more than a century of parading in pink tutus with dogs balancing on their backs, elephants in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s circus are preparing to take their final bow. By 2018, the star performers will retire from the spotlight to live out their lives in an elephant conservation centre. 

These days, fewer and fewer circuses use elephants and their stage exit mirrors the public’s increased empathy toward these animals. But studying their heyday as performers reveals important insights about their audience, in other words, about us as consumer of entertainment. 

Enter Susan Nance, an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Guelph whose research concentrates on entertainment, from vaudeville to street performers. Her interest in circus elephants was piqued after she uncovered “shocking things that circus historians don’t like to talk about,” says Nance, who set out to change the way historians look at animals. ... read the rest of the blog

Congratulations! Our own Professor Catharine Wilson is the 2014 winner of the Canadian Historical Review Prize for her article: “A Manly Art: Plowing, Plowing Matches, and Rural Masculinity in Ontario, 1800-1930," which appeared in the June 2014 issue of the Review. Dr. Wilson is Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professor of Rural History in the Department.

praise from the CHR board: This article contributes to a now substantial body of literature on changing forms of masculinity in the context of industrial capitalism; unlike most existing work, however, this article considers farm men. Thus, it simultaneously contributes to rural history, and the history of rural work. It examines what is probably the activity most frequently associated with rural men, plowing, over a long period of time. In so doing, it is able to examine the intersections between technological change and intergenerational identity formation. Wilson makes use of an impressive diversity of sources including visual and audio-visual sources. Her attention to iconography is especially commendable and makes for a rich, multifaceted analysis. Her evocative writing conveys the physical and aesthetic pleasures of plowing. It is an exemplary piece of historical writing and argumentation, one that will have wide appeal and value for anyone interested in rural history, technological change, and/or masculinity.

On April 18 at Knox College, University of Toronto the University of Guelph Centre for Scottish Studies & Scottish Studies Foundation present the 2015 Scottish Studies Spring Colloquium: "Sir John A. Macdonald's Legacy"

The Colloquium runs from 12noon to 4:30pm. All Welcome! For more information visit Scottish Studies

Get the schedule .pdf
Get the poster .pdf

Our Professor Ken Dorter recently gave a TEDx talk in Guelph titled, “What is free will free from?”

Our own J. Andrew Ross, a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the History Department, has just published Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945 with Syracuse University Press.

Congratulations from all of us!

from the jacket:   How did a small Canadian regional league come to dominate a North American continental sport? Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945 tells the fascinating story. ... The NHL had a special challenge: unlike other major leagues, it was a binational league that had to sell and manage its sport in two different countries. Joining the Clubs pays close attention to these national differences, as well as to the context of a historical period characterized by war and peace, by rapid economic growth and dire recession, and by the momentous technological and social changes of the modern age.

Our own Dr. Joshua MacFadyen has accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor at Arizona State University, beginning August 2015. Dr. MacFadyen earned his doctorate in our Department in 2010 and has since held a post-doc at the Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatechewan where he works in the Sustainable Farm Systems Project. Josh is also well known for his many years work with NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment and his research on energy, soil nutrient, and landscape sustainability in historical agro-ecosystems.

Congratulations from all of us!

Dr. Susan Nance's recent book, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is a finalist for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. Sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), the Prize recognizes outstanding scholarly books in non-Canadian history. The winner will be announced at the CHA Annual Meeting at the University of Ottawa on June 2.

Dr. Nance is Associate Professor of US History in the Department and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. Her research examines the histories of live performance and communication, with a special focus on animals in entertainment.