The Department of History (LA&PS) is delighted to welcome Dr Sean Kheraj (Ph.D., York, 2008), currently a limited‐term Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University in Calgary, to a tenure‐stream position in Canadian History at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective July 1, 2011.
Dr Kheraj works in the field of environmental history, focusing in particular on urban environments. He has turned his 2008 PhD dissertation into a book, Inventing Stanley Park, which has been accepted for publication by UBC Press. His article on “Restoring Nature: Ecology, Memory, and the Storm History of Vancouver’s Stanley Park”, published in the Canadian Historical Review 88.4 (2007), was awarded the CHR Prize for the best article published in that journal in 2007. He held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at UBC from 2008 to 2010, where he began a new project on urban ecologies that investigates the role of non‐human animals (horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and so on) in four Canadian cities since the mid‐nineteenth century. He is interested in the ways in which humans integrated these animals into the fabric of their urban lives for work, food and pleasure, and how these animals themselves had agency in their urban experience.
He is also centrally involved in sustaining the new network of environmental historians supported by the large SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster grant known as the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). He manages a popular monthly audio podcasting program, participates actively in NiCHE’s work with younger scholars, and maintains a blog site called “Notes on Knowledge Mobilization” that explores many issues in digital history.
Dr Kheraj will enhance the Department’s strength in Canadian History, Environmental History and Urban History, and we much look forward to welcoming him in July to our midst. For further details on his work, see http://www.seankheraj.com/