2014 North at Trent Lecture Series
The North at Trent lecture series provided both the Trent and broader Peterborough communities, the opportunity to engage with scholars and an artist whose work focuses on Canada’s north in myriad ways.
March 2014 Ashley Fellow Visiting Professor Veronica Strong-Boag
The Ashley Fellowship is funded by a bequest from the late Professor C.A. Ashley, longtime friend of Trent University and an enthusiastic supporter of the role that informal contacts of college life can play in academic pursuits. The Ashley Fellows are visiting scholars who reside at one of Trent’s residential Colleges for part of the year, delivering lectures and meeting with faculty and students. The Frost Centre was proud to be involved with the distinguished 2014 visiting professor Dr. Veronica Strong-Boag. The 2013–14 Ashley Fellowship was generously supported by the Undergraduate Departments of History, Gender & Women’s Studies and Canadian Studies, the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, The School of Education and Professional Learning, and Traill College. The lecture series has a proud history of bringing in top scholars. Credited with being one of the founders of Women’s and Gender History as a field of study, Prof. Strong-Boag, who teaches in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and Department of Educational Studies at UBC, is well known for both her scholarly work as well as her ongoing activism.
She is one of Canada’s most distinguished historians, a member of the Royal Society, and the 2012 winner of the Royal Society of Canada’s Tyrell Medal for her contributions to Canadian History. She has authored and edited over fifteen books. She is the recipient of many prestigious honour and awards, including a Killam Fellowship, the Jules and Gabrielle Leger Fellowship, the John A Macdonald prize for the best book in Canadian History and the Raymond Klibansky Prize.
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On the Frontline: Feminist Scholarship and Activism Challenge the Canadian New Right
March 5, Market Hall
Wanted Children? Child Welfare and Women’s Reproductive Choice
March 12, Bata Library Film Theatre, Symons Campus
Tracing a Feminist Genealogy: From Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) to Her Granddaughters
March 19, Bagnani Hall, Traill College
March 2014 Brown Bag Lunch Lectures
"The Scent of Canada: Multicultural Nationalism at the Royal B.C. Museum."
Wednesday March 12th
Dr. Caitlin Gordon-Walker (Frost Centre Research Associate)
“Indigenous Teachers at Grand River, Ontario in the 19th Century.”
Thursday March 27th
Dr. Alison Norman (Post Doctoral Fellow, Frost Centre)
27 February 2015 Suds n' Speakers
Getting Out of Town
Organizing Committee: Mary Anne Martin, Anne Showalter and Karen Everett
After enduring months of one of the fiercest winters in recent memory, scholars were seeking some virtual relief in addition to intellectual stimulation when they attended the Suds ‘n Speakers event, “Get Out of Town.” Dr. Julia Harrison and Dr. Michael Eamon did not disappoint when they whisked the crowd of about 20 from BE at the Trend to radically divergent times and places that nonetheless demonstrated the consistent themes of adventure and home. Professor Harrison, former Frost Centre director and author of the recently released book, A Timeless Place: The Ontario Cottage, spoke about “Getting Out of Town to Go Home.” She shared her research comparing “travel enthusiasts” with “cottagers” which raised recurrent themes of nationalism, home, and a sense of belonging. Dr. Harrison also illuminated the class- and race-based bounds of cottaging as well as the gendered nature of the work involved in travelling.
For Dr. Michael Eamon, Principal of Lady Eaton College, getting out of town involved sailing across the Atlantic. His talk, “Urban Aspirations, Rural Realities: Print and Sociability in British North America” painted a picture of eighteenth century Haligonians and Quebec City residents struggling to reproduce their London home through print and other means. This search for home took the audience to 1700s pubs and coffee houses where literacy levels played a central role in this quest. After the talks, a lively question and answer period ensued and attendees were treated to a scrumptious collection of refreshments. Many thanks to our host, BE at the Trend, and our generous sponsors, the Frost Centre and Traill College, for making the event possible.
10 February 2014 Graduate Professional Development Seminar with Traill College Fellow Scott McIntyre
Getting to Print In Canada--How to Publish for a General Audience
Scott McIntyre, founding partner and publisher of Douglas & McIntyre, will talk with you about the ins and outs of getting your work out to a general Canadian public. A true insider, Scott was part of McClelland Stewart before starting his own now renowned publishing company. He has led book publishing trade missions to Japan and the Netherlands. He has extensive board experience in publishing and other arts organizations. A member of the Order of Canada, he was awarded the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. He has also received the inaugural IVY Award for substantial contributions to Canadian Publishing from the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, and in 2013 was awarded the inaugural explorASIAN Community Builder Award.
26 November 2013 Frost Centre Graduate Student Professional Development Workshop
The Frost Centre is sponsoring a one hour session for graduate students on creating an academic CV. Graduate students from other programs are welcome to attend: Tues. Nov. 26th, 4:00-5:00 pm, Seminar Room, Kerr House, Traill College.
We will focus on creating an academic CV, which is often somewhat different from a resume, and we will also talk at the end of the session -- if there is interest -- about the key elements that should go into a covering letter for an academic job application.
20 November 2013 Graduate Seminar with Morton Lecturer Sean Cadigan
Every year, the History Dept and Canadian Studies sponsors an endowed lecture, the W.L. Morton Lecture, named in honour of one of Canada’s most eminent historians, and also the founding Master of Trent University’s Champlain College. The lecture this year, “Death on Two Fronts: Class, War, and the Politics of Commemoration in Newfoundland, 1914-34” will be given by Dr. Sean Cadigan (Memorial University) in the Bata Library Film Theatre, Tuesday November 19, at 5:00 p.m. All students are encouraged to attend.
We also organize a seminar for graduate students so that they can speak with the visiting scholar in a more intimate setting. On Wed. Nov. 20th, 11:00 to 1:00, Prof. Cadigan will open this seminar by talking about his research interests, how they evolved, and changed over time – and why. There will then be an opportunity for students to talk about their own research interests/projects if they wish. In order to accommodate the schedules of grad students in both History and Canadian Studies, we have scheduled the seminar with Prof. Cadigan over the lunch hour, in the Wilson Room, Kerr House. We will provide a light lunch. Please RSVP to Cathy Schoel (Cathyschoel@trentu.ca) if you plan to attend so that we can order food.
Prof. Cadigan has been a professor of History at Memorial University since 2001, and served as head of the university’s History department from 2010 to 2013. His research interests include the social and ecological history of fishers and fishing communities and the politics of class in Newfoundland and Labrador. He has published extensively on a wide range of topics, including work, economic development (recently on the Newfoundland oil industry), social and ecological issues, and Atlantic Canadian regional history. His first book was Hope and Deception in Conception Bay and his second book, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History, received the J.W. Dafoe Foundation Annual Book Prize for outstanding, non-fiction writing about Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs.
5 November 2013 Public Lecture with Steve Hewitt
"'Spotted Throughout with Red’: Canadian State Surveillance and the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1969-1988"
Dr. Steve Hewitt, University of Birmingham
Traditionally focused on the perceived subversive threat from the Communist Party of Canada and its affiliated groups and individuals to the Canadian state, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service found itself in unfamiliar territory in the latter half of the 1960s. A number of new social movements emerged, including student power, Red Power, Black Power, and Quebec nationalism. The Security Service’s response was to redefine what constituted a subversive and to begin surveillance and disruption operations against a range of groups and individuals. Even more of a challenge to the RCMP’s dominant world view was the Women’s Liberation Movement. An all-male police force now began to conduct surveillance against a largely all-female social movement.
Drawing on Security Service records, the problematic nature of which will be discussed, this paper examines the tactics and strategy used by the police against the Women’s Liberation Movement. It argues that ultimately the force’s own lack of clarity about what it was pursuing in terms of subversion combined with external factors, including the nature of the movement it spied upon, not just weakened its surveillance campaign but ultimately helped undermine counter-subversion as a dominant characteristic of the Canadian security state.
Steve Hewitt has published several books and articles related to security and intelligence in the past and present and in connection to Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Currently, he is co-writing with Christabelle Sethna a history of Canadian state surveillance of the Women’s Liberation Movement. He is also President of the British Association for Canadian Studies.
29 October 2013 Public Lecture with Bill Waiser
9 October 2013 Public Lecture with Sean Purdy
False Promises: Neoliberalism and the Redevelopment of Regent Park in the Context of North American Public Housing", 1990-2013
Dr. Sean Purdy (PhD, Queens University, 2003) has taught at Temple University in Philadelphia and at the University of Brasília. Since 2006, he is an associate professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2009, he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. He has published a textbook on the history of the US in Portuguese and various academic articles in US, Canadian, Brazilian and British journals as well as dozens of short articles in popular history magazines in Brazil. He is now conducting comparative research on slums, ghettos and favelas in the Americas, 1940s-1990s.
8 October 2013 Public Lecture with Shirley Tillotson
The moral worlds of fair taxation: a perspective from 20th century Canadian history
In a 1959 interview, the dean of Canadian economic and political history, Donald Creighton, blithely affirmed that Canadians were, whether we liked it or not, "socialists" who have always carried a heavy tax burden willingly, in a collective effort, for the sake of our independent national life.[i] In 2006, the Fraser Institute's Mark Milke called on Canadians to throw off our serfdom, and in describing our tax history, Milke chose the Chinese head tax to illustrate how taxation is oppressive.[ii] These caricatures of the moral worlds of taxation -- as the cheerfully-paid price of our own national civilization or the oppressive exactions of an immoral state -- are deployed in Canadian tax talk partly because Canadian historians have provided scholars of law, politics, and economics so little to work with by way of real tax history. In my research on the cultural history of taxation in 20th century Canada, I have found , in contrast to the simple stories of rational compliance or heroic resistance, that past practices of tax collecting, paying, and dodging offer much that is surprising about the moral engagements -- their variety and historical contingency -- involved in the raising of a revenue.
This paper proposes one of the key arguments of my book, Freedom and Fairness: i.e., that, because most kinds of tax cannot be economically collected without a substantial measure of voluntary compliance most of the time, the history of taxation is a history of the circumstances -- of both tax collector and tax payer -- that shape compliance or justify resistance. Rather than simply being forced extraction, taxation in 20th century Canada has always required moral choice. How that moral choice has been framed, by whom, for what ends, and with what effects -- that's what's interesting about tax history.
Shirley Tillotson, Dalhousie University / University of King's College
Shirley Tillotson is a professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University. She is the author of The Public at Play and Contributing Citizens. Her current research is in the cultural history of taxation in Canada between 1916 and 1971. This project forms part of a collaborative project with several other historians working in Canadian and colonial history. Tillotson's work in taxation forms part of her larger career project of understanding change over the period 1900 to 1970 in the relations of state and society. She studies the history of power as it forms and reforms in the interplay of families and markets, images and institutions, stories and statutes.
[i] Paul Fox and Donald Creighton, A Long View of Canadian History (Toronto: CBC Publications Branch, 1959), 3-6. Reprinted in Michael S. Cross, ed. The Frontier Thesis and the Canadas: The Debate on the Impact of the Canadian Environment (Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing, 1970), 42
[ii] Mark Milke, A Nation of Serfs?: how Canada's political culture corrupts Canadian values (Mississauga, ON: J. Wiley and Sons, 2006), chapter 3.
Fall 2013 250th Anniversary of the 1763 Royal Proclamation
In addition to earlier Peterborough events, Trent University also participated in a commemoration event in London, England in the fall of 2013. Current director of the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies and Trent history professor Dr. John Milloy travelled to London with a Canadian delegation. The delegation attended at the Church of the Guards Chapel to address the anniversary. Canada’s deputy high commissioner also attended the ceremony after hosting a breakfast at Canada House located in Trafalgar Square. Earlier in the trip a ceremony and wreath laying was held at the Guards Chapel in remembrance of the First Nations soldiers of WWI.
