Dear colleagues,
I am very pleased to report the latest assortment of news from the Graduate History Program.
PhD and Comprehensive Exam Defenses
• The following students have successfully defended their PhD dissertations since March 2014:
Mark Abraham, “”You Are Your Own Alternative”: Performance, Pleasure, and the American Counterculture, 1965-1975,” supervised by Marc Stein.
David Zylberberg, “Plants and Fossils: Household Fuel Consumption in Hampshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire 1750-1830,” supervised by Jeanette Neeson.
Dagomar Degroot, “The Frigid Golden Age: Experiencing Climate Change in the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720,” supervised by Richard Hoffmann.
Andrew Watson, “Poor Soils and Rich Folks: Household Economics and Sustainability in Muskoka, 1850-1920,” supervised by Colin Coates.
Kato Perdue, “Writing Desire: The Love Letters of Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams,” supervised by Kate McPherson.
Terence Wilde, “Masculinity, Medicine and Mechanization: The Construction of Occupational Health in Northern Ontario, 1890-1925,” supervised by Kate McPherson.
Samira Saramo, “Life Moving Forward: Soviet Karelia in the Letters & Memoirs of Finnish North Americans,” supervised by Roberto Perin.
Evgeny Efremkin, “At the Intersections of Nations, Diasporas, and Modernities: North American Finns in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” supervised by Roberto Perin.
Gilberto Fernandes, “Of Outcasts and Ambassadors: The Making of Portuguese Diaspora in Postwar North America,” supervised by Roberto Perin.
Raphael Costa, “Making the New Lourinha a European Lourinha: Democracy, Civic Engagement, and the Urban Development of Lourinha, Portugal, since 1966,” supervised by Adrian Shubert.
Angela Rooke, “Raising Christian Citizens for the Twentieth Century: Children, Religion, and Society in Protestant Ontario,” supervised by Bettina Bradbury.
Katherine Bausch, “He Thinks He’s Down: White Appropriation of Black Masculinities in the Civil Rights Era, 1945-1979,” supervised by Marc Stein.
Please join me in congratulating these students!
• The following PhD students successfully passed their comprehensive exams in April 2014:
Myles Ali
Della Roussin
Jean Smith
Please join me in congratulating these students!
Scholarships News
• Seven students in the program won SSHRC awards:
Cynthia (Cindy) Walker (CGS)
Lydia Wytenbroek (CGS)
Harrison Forsyth
Jeffrey Gunn
Jason Chartrand
Nathan Ince
Sukhmani Virdi
• The following eleven students were awarded Ontario Graduate Scholarships:
Myles Ali
Hayley Andrew
Mathieu Brule
Maryann Buri
Kevin Burris
Francesca D’Amico
Erin Dolmage
Victoria Jackson
Aaron Miedema
Vanessa Oliveira
Michelle Fu
Doctoral candidate Madeleine Chartrand (supervised by Doug Hay) won a Provost Dissertation Scholarship. This award allows York students going into the fifth year of their PhD to concentrate exclusively on writing and completing their dissertations. Madeleine’s dissertation explores how the Master and Servant law shaped the experience of female workers in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, Her study will examine prosecution and conviction rates, in addition to the punishments exacted on female servants, in economically different regions of the country
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Doctoral candidate Stacy Nation-Knapper (supervised by Carolyn Podruchny) won a Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship. This award allows York students going into the fifth year of their PhD to concentrate exclusively on writing and completing their dissertations. Stacy’s dissertation examines how the fur trade in the Columbia River Plateau has been memorialized through the lens of the Spokane House landmark site in Washington. Her work promises to reveal important distinctions between Indigenous and Euro-American constructions of place, kinship, and memory in this district as well as their present-day significance in both socioeconomic and legal realms.
Doctoral candidate Ronald (Ronnie) Morris won a St. George’s Society Scholarship, an award presented to students working on novel projects in British Studies. Ronnie’s PhD examines the relationship between changing attitudes towards child welfare and those concerning young criminals and how these processes worked jointly to produce a concept of juvenile crime, His work concentrates on London in the second half of the eighteenth century and is supervised by Nicholas Rogers.
Doctoral student Daniel Ross won an Avie Bennett Scholarship in Canadian History. This award allows York students in Canadian History going into the fifth year of their PhD to concentrate exclusively on writing and completing their dissertation. Dan’s dissertation is entitled “Remaking Downtown Toronto: Politics, Urban Revitalization and Public Space on Yonge Street, 1945-1980”. In it, he documents the role and impact of a number of different interest groups who attempted to transform Yonge Street in both physical and symbolic ways during an important era of growth in the city.
Sara Farhan, starting her second year in the PhD program, won a research and travel grant from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa for her proposal to investigate the deployment of governance techniques and the establishment of Baghdad Television in Hashemite Iraq.
Please join me in congratulating all these students on their numerous achievements!
Congratulations to the Luso-African Group at the Tubman Institute on recently being honoured by the Angolan Community of Ontario, through its President, Mr. Antonio Ildo Major Alves, with a Certificate of Appreciation for their “dedication to educate people about Angolan culture and history” within the Angolan community in Ontario. The awards were presented on September 20, 2014, on the occasion of Angola’s National Heroes Day, marking the anniversary of the birth of the first President of independent Angola, Agostinho Neto, on September 17, 1922. The certificates were presented by His Excellency Agostinho Tavares da Silva Neto, Angola’s Ambassador to Canada, to Professor José C. Curto, Dr. Frank J. Luce, and to PhD candidates Vanessa S. Oliveira, Tracy Lopes, Maryann Buri, and Faustino Kusoka. The occasion also provided Toronto’s Angolan community with an opportunity to mark the departure of Ambassador Tavares for his new posting as Ambassador to the United States of America in Washington.
Postdoctoral Fellowships and Publications News
Doctoral student Chris Dawson has received a Crake Fellowship in Classics, which he is holding for the year 2014-15 at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. The expectation of fellows is that they finish their dissertations and teach the equivalent of one course per semester. This will mark a return to eastern Canada for Chris, since his BA in History and Classics was completed at St. Mary’s University in Halifax before he moved to Brock University for his MA in Classics and then to York. Chris’s dissertation is entitled “Intimate Communities: Honorary Statues and Political Culture in the Cities of Africa Proconsularis” and is supervised by Jonathan Edmondson.
Eric Payseur (PhD, 2013) has recently been appointed the American Historical Association—Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow for Career Diversity and the History PhD in the History Department at the University of New Mexico (UNM). New Mexico is one of four universities awarded the grant, along with UCLA, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. This is a three-year postdoc to begin a redefinition of the History PhD as a degree that only (or mostly) leads to a (research/teaching) career in higher education. In this role, Eric will be creating internships for UNM graduate students and expanding the opportunities for History PhDs in the private, non-profit and public sectors. He plans to organize a panel on this initiative at the 2016 AHA annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, with his colleagues from the other universities.
Eric’s doctoral dissertation explored Polish Canadian identity in twentieth-century Canada and was supervised by Roberto Perin. For more information about his current initiative, see the AHA’s website at:
http://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/current-projects/career-diversity-for-historians
Doctoral student Nathan Wilson and Colin McCullough (PhD, York, 2013) published a co-edited collection entitled Violence, Memory, and History: Western Perceptions of Kristallnacht (New York: Routledge, 2014). The book was recently launched at York, and according to the press, “delves into the horrors of November 1938 and to what degree they portended the Holocaust, demonstrating the varied reactions of Western audiences to news about the pogrom against the Jews. A pattern of stubborn governmental refusal to help German Jews to any large degree emerges throughout the book. Much of this was in response to uncertain domestic economic conditions and underlying racist attitudes towards Jews. Contrasting this was the outrage expressed by ordinary people around the world who condemned the German violence and challenged the policy of Appeasement being advanced by Great Britain and France towards Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German government at the time.” Nathan is currently completing his PhD in the History program (supervised by Molly Ladd-Taylor) and is a professor with the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Durham College (see Job Market news below); Colin is a L.R. Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. His doctoral dissertation on the cultural history of Canadian peacekeeping was supervised by Marlene Shore.
Francis (Frank) Peddie (PhD, 2012, supervised by Roberto Perin) published Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973-2010 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014). This book was launched in Toronto in September, and according to the press, “documents the experiences of Chilean-Canadians. [It] also considers how the admission of people from the wrong side of the Cold War ideological divide had a lasting effect on Canadian immigration and refugee policy, establishing a precedent for the admission of political exiles over the decades that followed.” Dr. Peddie is currently teaching in the Department of International Development at Nagoya University in Japan.
Todd Webb (PhD, 2006, supervised by William Westfall) published Transatlantic Methodists: British Wesleyanism and the formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). Adapted from his doctoral dissertation, the book was shortlisted for the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, awarded by the Canadian Historical Association, and “uncovers how the Methodist ministry and laity in these colonies, whether they were British, American, or native-born, came to define themselves as transplanted Britons and Wesleyans, in response to their changing, often contentious relationship with the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Britain.” Dr. Webb is currently an assistant professor of history at Laurentian University.
Sean Kheraj (PhD, 2008, supervised by H.V. Nelles) has won the Clio Prize (British Columbia) for 2014 from the Canadian Historical Association for Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). In their citation, the awards committee described the book as “not just an environmental history of one of Canada’s great urban parks. It is also a story about Canadians’ complicated relationship with ‘Nature’. Drawing on a sophisticated literature this accessible, well-illustrated volume overturns some popular understandings of the park and invites us to see it as a site with multiple histories still being written. It captures the flavour of a quintessential British Columbia landscape and the ongoing debate over how to define and defend it.” Dr. Kheraj is currently an assistant professor of history at York University.
Gregory Kennedy (PhD, 2008; supervisor Tim Le Goff) published Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604-1755 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). Kennedy’s comparative study “offers a new and compelling analysis of the characteristics of two French rural societies – the Loudunais, a frontier region of western France, and Acadie, a frontier colony of New France. The choice of the Loudunais is particularly important because many of Acadie’s founding families originated there. Based on a thorough examination of archival evidence on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as responding to the appropriate Acadian and French historiographies, [the book] examines in turn the natural environment of each society, the political and military environment, the economy, the characteristics of seigneurialism, and local governance.” Dr. Kennedy is currently an assistant professor (Professeur adjoint) in the Département d’histoire et géographie at Université de Moncton.
Geoff Read (PhD, 2006; supervisor Bill Irvine) published The Republic of Men: Gender, Race, Women, and the Political Parties in Interwar France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014). In this volume, Read “explores the intersection of gender bias and the eight most important political parties in interwar France, breaking new scholarly ground in profound ways. The first to compare gender discourse across the political spectrum in a national context and trace the origins of the fascist “new man” in other political traditions, Read evaluates the impact of gender discourse upon policy during a pivotal period in French history.” Dr. Read is currently an assistant professor of history at Huron University College at Western University.
Aitana Guia (PhD, 2011, supervisor Adrian Shubert) published The Muslim Struggle for Civil Rights in Spain: Promoting Democracy through Migrant Engagement, 1985-2010 in April with Sussex Academic Press. The press describes the book as one that demonstrates that a key factor left out of studies of post-Franco Spain, “namely immigration and specifically Muslim immigration—has helped reinvigorate and strengthen the democratic process. Despite broad diversity and conflicting agendas, Muslim immigrants—often linking up with native converts to Islam—have mobilized as an effective force. They have challenged the long tradition of Maurophobia exemplified in such mainstream festivities as the Festivals of Moors and Christians; they have taken to task residents and officials who have stood in the way of efforts to construct mosques; and they have defied the members of their own community who have refused to accommodate the rights of women.” Dr. Guia currently holds a contractually-limited assistant professor appointment in the Department of History at York University.
In July, recently-completed PhD student Raphael Costa (see page 2) won the 2013-14 Oliveira Marques Prize, awarded by the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, for his article “The ‘great façade of nationality’: some considerations on Portuguese tourism and the multiple meanings of Estado Novo Portugal in travel literature,” Journal of Tourism History v.5, n.1 (2013): 50-72.
Conferences and Exhibitions
Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Toronto (May 22-25)
The Sixteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (aka the Big Berks) was hosted at the University of Toronto, and York faculty and graduate students alike played a big role in its success. Molly Ladd-Taylor served as one of four co-chairs of the Program Committee, Anne Rubenstein co-chaired the Caribbean, Latin American and Afro/Francophone Worlds subcommittee, and Bettina Bradbury co-chaired the Balance and Equity subcommittee. The Graduate Student Assistants and New Scholar volunteers included Katharine Bausch, Marlee Couling, and Marlene Gaynair, and the Poster Session Program Committee included PhD students Pamela Fuentes, Abril Liberatori, and Noa Yaari. Marc Stein served on the Local Arrangements Committee and PhD student Jenny Ellison ran the social media campaign.
Overall, nine faculty members of the History graduate program presented papers, three others were presented by recent PhDs (Aitana Guia, Kato Perdue and Samira Saramo), and twelve others were presented by the following current History PhD students: Funke Aladejebi, Hayley Andrew, Katharine Bausch, Ashlee Bligh, Denise Challenger, Francesca D’Amico, Pamela Fuentes, Angela Hug, Sara Howdle, Karlee Sapoznik, Nathan Wilson, and Brittany Luby. In the words of Molly Ladd-Taylor, it was “truly a collaborative project.” For more about the conference and the Berks as an organization, please see http://berks2014.com/
Greek Canadian History Project (May 12-17)
In June 2012, the Greek Canadian History Project (GCHP) was founded by PhD student Christopher Grafos and History program member Sakis Gekas, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek History. The GCHP is “an initiative designed to acquire, preserve, and provide access to historical materials that reflect the experiences of Canada’s Greek immigrants and their descendants.” On 12 May, a reception was held to launch a five-day exhibition in the Rotunda/Hall of Memory at Toronto City Hall. Entitled “Memory and Migration: A History of Greeks in Toronto,” the exhibition showcased a display of historical photos and documents from the GCHP collection highlighting Greek immigrant life in Toronto. The project’s collections can be accessed through York University Libraries and public outreach for the project and exhibition has also been undertaken by Kali Petropoulos (BA, History, York). For more on the project, please see: http://archives.library.yorku.ca/gchp/
Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing (June 13-15)
The Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing (CAHN) was held at York and co-organized by History graduate program faculty member Kate McPherson and current PhD student Lydia Wytenbroek, who is currently the Vice-President of CAHN. The theme of the conference was “Local Work, Global Health and the Challenge of Transnational Nursing,” and brought scholars from various academic backgrounds together. The Conference opened on Friday evening with a special panel entitled “Rethinking Nursing in the First World War,” while the 2014 AMS Hannah Lecture was delivered by Dr. Juanita De Barros of McMaster University on Saturday afternoon. She discussed her research on maternal and infant health policy in the British Caribbean in her talk entitled, “Grannies, Midwives, and Infant Welfare in the Post-slavery British Caribbean.” Participating faculty included Molly Ladd-Taylor and Deb Neill, while papers were presented by Lydia Wytenbroek and Sandria Green-Stewart (MA, History, York, 2014, and presently a History PhD candidate at McMaster University).
Job Market News
Benjamin Bryce was this summer appointed to a tenure-stream position as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. Dr. Bryce defended his PhD in January 2013 entitled “Making Ethnic Space: Education, Religion, and the German Language in Argentina and Canada, 1880-1930,” and was supervised by Roberto Perin. Ben also held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 2013-14. Ben’s work has appeared in Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, the Canadian Historical Review, and the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. He is the co-editor of a book forthcoming with the University Press of Florida and entitled Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada. At UNBC, Ben will teach courses on Latin America, health in the Americas and Europe, and world history. In 2014-15, he is teaching “Environment, Export Economies, and Workers in Latin America since 1850,” “Global Public Health,” and “World History since 1550.”
Angela Rooke was recently hired at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Career Action as their Graduate Professional Skills Co-ordinator. Angela works to promote and enhance career and professional skills development support for graduate students at UW. She works with faculty champions, campus partners and the graduate-student facing career advisors to identify graduate student needs, develop custom programs/services, and to increase student participation in current programs. She is also responsible for enhancing overall curriculum and messaging. For more on Angela’s dissertation, see page 2.
Jason (Jay) Young (PhD, 2012) was appointed full-time as Outreach Officer for the Archives of Ontario in October. Jay will be working on activities such as the Archives’ Travelling Exhibits Program as well as promoting the Archives with particular stakeholders and the general public. Jay’s dissertation is entitled “Searching for a Better Way: Subway Life and Metropolitan Growth in Toronto, 1942-1978” and was supervised by Marlene Shore. In 2013, he received a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship which he held at McMaster University. Jay was also active in the organization of the History Matters lecture series, organized by the Toronto Public Library and ActiveHistory.ca. The OPS website noted that approximately 556 applicants applied for the position that Jay has secured, and he looks forward to building an even stronger relationship between the History department and the Archives, which he describes as a “natural fit”. For more on Jay, see historianjayyoung.wordpress.com
Daniel Rueck has recently received a tenure-track appointment in Indigenous History at the University of Ottawa. Dr Rueck, who received his PhD from McGill University in 2013, held a postdoctoral fellowship from the “Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture” at the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. During his time at York, Dr Rueck ran a very successful seminar series through the Robarts Centre on “Indigenous Peoples and the Environment.” He also taught an upper-level seminar on Indigenous issues in the Canadian Studies programme at Glendon College. Since January of this year, he has held a term appointment in History at McGill University.
Rebecca Dirnfeld: A former PhD student in the Graduate History Program, Rebecca decided to pursue her career-related interest in student advising and career counselling in January 2013. She received her diploma from George Brown College’s Career and Work Counsellor Program in December 2013 and is now a certified career counsellor. Rebecca has since designed a website called Graduates in Transition to document the stories of students like her who change career pathways, and the successes and challenges they face while transitioning. The website has grown to become a resource for students and graduates navigating their transition from school to work. Rebecca volunteered as a career advisor at OISE’s Student Success Centre and worked as a career administrator/client services administrator at Eisen Consulting. She now works as a career consultant for Arts and Science students at Ryerson University.
Rebecca’s website is http://www.graduatesintransition.com/
After gaining teaching opportunities at Ryerson University, OCAD University, and Durham College, Nathan Wilson accepted a full-time, permanent position as Professor with Durham College’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies this past summer. Since September, Nathan has been teaching mainly out of their main Oshawa campus. He is currently teaching General Education electives; the emphasis is on teaching rather than research per se and so he currently has a 4-4 teaching load. Nathan explains, however, that Ontario colleges in general enthusiastically support applied research and there are a lot of research-focused opportunities available to faculty. He notes further that there is great opportunity at the College to develop curricula as well as to get involved with dual credit and university-partnership programs. They have well-developed professional development supports and services for faculty as the College itself continues to expand. Nathan continues to work towards the completion of his Ph.D. entitled “Hitler, Homosexuality and the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in West Germany and the US.” with Molly Ladd-Taylor as supervisor.
Lisa Rumiel defended her PhD in 2009, entitled “Random Murder by Technology: The Role of Scientific and Biomedical Experts in the Anti-Nuclear Movement, 1969-1992,” and supervised by the late Gina Feldberg. She then worked as Research Projects Facilitator at Ryerson University, liaising with faculty on tri-council (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) grant proposals. Her role varied from actual grant-writing (mainly for large team grants) to providing writing assistance, doing content peer-reviews and other reviews. Lisa has since returned to York as the Awards and Nominations Specialist in the Office of Research Services. She works on the coordination of internal awards competitions and the development of external awards and nominations applications, working closely with nominees and applicants (faculty), Faculties (ADRs, Research Officers), and VPRI (AVP and VPs) to prepare competitive files. Some of the competitions she has worked on to date include the York Research Chairs program, the Canada Research Chairs, Trudeau Fellowships, Royal Society of Canada Fellowships, etc.
In Memoriam: Myra Rutherdale (1961-2014)
by Prof. Carolyn Podruchny
Professor Myra Rutherdale (MA ’88, PhD ’96) died suddenly and unexpectedly early in the morning of May 22 of a heart attack. Despite battling cancer for five years, she was able to live fully and actively until she died. She was ill but her passing was unexpected. She died peacefully with family and friends by her side. She is survived by her husband, Robert Rutherdale (PhD ’94), a Canadian historian at Algoma University, and her son Andrew, an artist and student.
Prof. Rutherdale specialized in gender and embodiment; native/newcomer relations; Aboriginal health; the history of medicine; religion and mission histories; northern Canada; British Columbia; environmental history; and cultural history. She is best known for her three books: Women and the White Man’s God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (2002);Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Colonial Canada (2005), edited by Myra Rutherdale and Katie Pickles; and Caregiving On The Periphery: Historical Perspectives on Nursing and Midwifery in Canada (2010).
Across Canada and around the globe, Prof. Rutherdale inspired and sustained a vast circle of family, friends and colleagues.
Prof. Rutherdale lived, worked and studied in most parts of Canada. Throughout her life, she embodied her passion for Canadian history and literature. She taught at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University College of the Fraser Valley. She had a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Saskatchewan. She purchased a house in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. She was a student in Hamilton and Toronto, Ont. She got tenure at York University. She was born in St. John, NB. And she studied Canada’s north. And last week she was reading Frederick Philip Grove’s 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh for fun.
She did not let cancer slow her down in any way. This past year she was the undergraduate program director for the Department of History and she served as a council member for the Canadian Historical Association. Last fall, she published an article on northern women negotiating fashion in colonial encounter. Last spring, while in Jerusalem, she presented a paper on the Idle No More movement. In the past four years, she travelled to Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark and France.
The last two lines of Prof. Rutherdale’s book Women and the White Man’s God speak to how she dealt with cancer and lived her life: “Barbara Kingsolver concludes The Poisonwood Biblewith the thought that ‘Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song of her own.’ In the same way, the Aboriginal peoples in northern Canada are once again singing their own.”
In Memoriam: Joseph Ernst (1931-2014)
by Prof. Marc Egnal
Joseph Ernst (1931-2014) was an extraordinary member of York’s history department from its early days in the late 1960s until his retirement in the 1990s. I first met Joe in 1967 at the University of Wisconsin where I was a graduate student, and he was asked to lead the seminar in the American Revolution while my adviser, Merrill Jensen, was on leave. That was a singular honor for a recent (1962) Wisconsin Ph.D. Those were heady years to study the Revolution, and Joe was in the forefront of a group of young scholars who were challenging the emphasis on elite ideology put forward by historians such as Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn. Joe’s emphasis was less on history “from the bottom up” than on the role of interest in shaping the actions of both the wealthy and the common folk. His pathbreaking work included his book, Money and Politics in America, 1775-1775 (1973) and his essay in Alfred Young’s collection The American Revolution (1976).
Soon after his stint in Madison he received his appointment at York, and thanks to his enthusiasm about this new institution, I applied for a position and joined him on the faculty in 1970, pleased I could continue our spirited discussions about political economy, the Revolution, and the changing shape of historiography. Joe, as all of us who worked with him agreed, was a charismatic teacher. He lectured without notes, and commanded the rapt attention of the several hundred students who enrolled in his US survey course. He made every lecture a voyage of discovery, pausing often to reflect on the material he was presenting. His fourth-year seminar on the Revolution was also much admired. He regularly brought his students to Williamsburg, Virginia, thereby combining his love for long road trips with his interest in early America.
He brought the same intensity and spirit of enquiry to his graduate seminars, and when I joined the graduate program I found no instruction better than sitting in on his seminars. But then I was simply reminded of my earlier time with him in Madison.
In his retirement he devoted himself to his wife, Michele Greene, his five children, and 14 grandchildren. At his memorial service I was delighted to hear from many of those grandchildren about the trips they had taken with Joe, the sage advice he gave them, and the pleasure he took in sharing with them his love of US history.
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If you have other news about current or recently-graduated students, please let me know so that I can report it in the next news bulletin.
William Jenkins
Director,
Graduate Program in History