The 2017/18 academic year has been an impressive one for the Trent History M.A. program.  Two students have won national scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This year also marks the start of an annual scholarship offered by the United Empire Loyalists Association of Canada (UELAC). 

These awards bring a cumulative total of $37,000 in external scholarships to help fund History graduate research this year, in addition to the generous funding package provided by Trent.

Michelle Arentsen and Melissa Hennig have each won a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, valued at $17,500 for a 12-month period of study. The scholarships are awarded based on candidates’ record of academic excellence, as well as the quality and potential of their research projects. Both Ms. Arentsen and Ms. Hennig are working on the history of children in eighteenth-century Britain. Ms. Arentsen’s project will explore the behaviour of delinquent children in a London institution run by the Royal Philanthropic Society from 1788 to 1825. Ms. Hennig’s thesis will examine the way that social reformers in Britain’s commercial classes viewed children in the art, literature, and court reporting of the mid-eighteenth century.

Ms. Arentsen has been fortunate in also winning one of two inaugural John Chard Scholarship bursaries from the Kawartha Chapter of the UELAC. Trent History M.A. student Gareth Copeland won as well for his research project that examines English soldiers’ descriptions of service in Eurasia and the Americas from 1770 to 1820.  All of these students are supervised by Professor Jennine Hurl-Eamon.