Dr. Elizabeth Elliot-Meisel
The School for the Study of Canada is pleased to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Elliot-Meisel for the fall of 2022, as the inaugural Trent University Fulbright Research Chair. As part of her Fellowship, she will be teaching CAST 4890H: Culture, Literature, Art. For 2022, this seminar will focus on Comparative Public Memory and Public History, exploring the origins and development of public memory in the United States and Canada and its relationship to professional history. Students seek to answer such questions as: Why have certain historical events and individuals become so important to the people of each nation? Do popular perceptions of those events, memorials, monuments, art, groups, and individuals match in the historical record? What do popular perceptions reveal about inhabitants as a people and a country? The course also investigates and evaluates the ethics of the historical profession and historians’ craft as laid out by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association. Additionally, in 2022, this course can be taken as a cross list for degree requirements for History.
Dr. Elizabeth Elliot-Meisel joined the Department of History at Creighton University (Omaha, NE, USA) in 1993 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2000. She served as department chair from 2001-2010. Elliot-Meisel received her Ph.D. from Duke University, where she was on a Ford Foundation scholarship. While at Duke she studied under Dr. Alec Douglas, visiting professor from Directorate of History, Ottawa. As the Directorate’s director, Douglas served as Elliot-Meisel’s Canadian advisor for her dissertation: Canada and the United States in the Northwest Passage.
Dr. Elliot-Meisel’s first book, Arctic Diplomacy: Canada and the United States in the Northwest Passage (1998) built upon and expanded the doctorate thesis. Her research continues to focus on U.S.-Canada relations in the Arctic in general and the Northwest Passage in particular. Recent publications include the co-authored (P. Whitney Lackenbauer) 2-volume document collection “One of the Great Polar Navigators”: Captain T.C. Pullen’s Personal Records of Arctic Voyages. Lackenbauer and Elliot-Meisel are currently writing a biography of Pullen, and Elliot-Meisel is also writing a second book about Canadians in the Arctic, tentatively titled Arctic Visionaries.
Elliot-Meisel’s father’s family was Canadian. Her grandfather studied at the University of Toronto, became a historian, served for Canada in World War I, and then moved to the USA and taught at Columbia University, New York. Family members lived in the Toronto, Windsor, the Georgian Bay area, and Montreal, so visits to Canada were frequent. In 2018 Elliot-Meisel was finally able to explore the Arctic first-hand, traveling to Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Tuktoyaktuk.
Elliot-Meisel believes that History tells the ever-dynamic story of people that always asks new questions of the past and challenges people of today to seek a deeper and broader understanding of those who came before them.