The biannual report on news from the Graduate History Program is oulined below. This note reports on the feverish pace of PhD completions, students passing their comprehensive exams in the fall, and recent awards.
Since last May we have had twelve students successfully defend their doctoral dissertations. These are:
- Susanna Miranda, “Not Ashamed or Afraid: Portuguese Immigrant Women in Toronto’s Cleaning Industry, 1950-1995,” supervised by Roberto Perin
- Jarett Henderson, “Uncivil Subjects: Metropolitan Meddling, Conditional Loyalty, and Lord Durham’s 1838 Administration of Lower Canada,” supervised by Bettina Bradbury
- Colin McMahon, “Ports of Recall: Memory of the Great Irish Famine in Liverpool and Montreal,” supervised by Stephen Brooke
- Jason Russell, “The Union Local in Post-Second-World War Canada: A Case Study of UAW/CAW Local 27 From 1950-1990,” supervised by Craig Heron
- Kristine Alexander, “The Girl Guide Movement, Imperialism and Internationalism in Interwar England, Canada and India,” supervised by Bettina Bradbury
- Daniel Horner, “Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics and Identity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Montreal,” supervised by Bettina Bradbury
- Sophia Koutsoyannis, “Immoral but Profitable: The Social Cultural History of Cabarets in Mexico City (1920-1965),” supervised by Anne Rubenstein
- Mathieu Lapointe, “La Comit de Moralité Publique, l’Enquête Caron et les Campagnes de Moralité Publique à Montréal, 1940-1954,” supervised by Roberto Perin
- Bradley Skopyk, “Undercurrents of Conquest: The Shifting Terrain of Indigenous Agriculture in Colonial Tlaxcala, Mexico,” supervised by Richard Hoffmann
- Guillaume Teasdale, “The French of Orchard Country: Territory, Landscape and Ethnicity in the Detroit River Region, 1680s-1810s,” supervised by Carolyn Podruchny
- Jim Clifford, “A Wetland Suburb on the Edge of London: A Social and Environmental History of West Ham and the River Lea, 1865-1914,” supervised by Stephen Brooke
- Eric Dussault, “Les Mythes et la réalité de ‹‹ l’âge d’or de Saint-Germain-des Prés (1945-1960)›› de 1945 à nos jours,” supervised by Suzanne Langlois
Congratulations to all these students!
Also, nine students passed their comprehensive exams in November. These are:
- Michael Ainsworth
- Mathieu Brûlé
- Adrian Gamble
- Amanda Robinson
- Gilberto Fernandes
- Chris Grafos
- Ronald Morris
- Jen Hassum
- Francesca D’Amico
There has also been an ongoing parade of successes to add to our banner year of awards won by our doctoral students. SSHRC found more money in its budget for this year and is able to grant two more students in the Graduate History Program SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships! Congratulations go to Angela Rooke, examining the myriad ways that religion structured the lives of Protestant children in early Canada, and to Andrew Watson, who is tracing the social metabolism of the Muskoka Lakes region, uncovering the roots and processes leading to an affluent culture of recreation and consumption. This raises the Graduate History Program’s SSHRC success rate for 2010 to four Doctoral Fellowships, two Canadian Graduate Scholarships, and one Vanier award.
Our success in winning prizes extends all the way to the south of the continent. Pamela Fuentes, in her third year of the doctoral program, has won the highly prestigious “Beca Conacyt Bicentenario. Beca Conacyt al Extranjero 2010,” provided by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (the National Council of Science and Technology) an agency of the Mexican government. Her doctoral thesis will explore the role of pimps and madams in Mexico City between 1920 and 1940. It examines how these individuals got involved not only in the sexual trade but also in the world of politics after the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution. At the same time, it explores how representatives of the Mexican state (politicians, military men, police officers, and the like) were involved with prostitution. By focusing on the politics of gender, sexuality and culture, her doctoral dissertation will explore how politics, vice, sin, and popular culture were intertwined in the construction of post-revolutionary Mexico City.
Additionally, Bradley Skopyk won a highly prestigious Post-Doctoral Fellowship to work on Teotihuacan Project in Mexico. Beginning 2011, this freshly minted PhD will take up a post-doctoral appointment at the Institute for Anthropological Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico. During his two-year stay, he will work with anthropologists and archaeologists in the Teotihuacan Project which explores the environmental history of the Teotihuacan Valley during the last 1,300 years. Brad will focus on environmental processes and changes initiated by Spanish colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.