In a聽, CBC journalist Jorge Barrera notes how聽Tyla Betke鈥檚 discovery of documents at Library and Archives Canada revealed the patterns of cover up used to hide the systemic sexual abuse at Birtle Residential School in Manitoba. Betke鈥檚 research was published in the聽Canadian Historical Review聽in 2023.

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History Alumna Dr. Mary-Ann Shantz has just published a book with UBC Press: .

Covering the history of the nudist movement in Canada, this book is based on her dissertation. (She completed her Ph.D. with the History Department in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. James Opp.)

杏吧原创 the Book:

What Nudism Exposes offers an original perspective on postwar Canada by situating the nudist movement within the broader social and cultural context and considering how nudist clubs navigated changing times.

As the nudist movement took root in Canada after the Second World War, its members advanced the idea that going nude and looking at the nude bodies of others satisfied natural curiosity, loosened the hold of social taboos, and encouraged mental health. By the 1970s, nudists increasingly emphasized the pleasurable aspects of their practice. Mary-Ann Shantz contends that throughout the postwar decades, nudists sought social approval as they engaged with contemporary concerns about childrearing, sexuality, public nudity, and the natural environment. Nudist clubs were committed to dissociating nudity from sexuality and to creating space for men, women, and children to socialize in the nude, extolling the movement as complementary with modern family life.

This perceptive, eminently readable book explains the perspectives of the nudist movement while questioning its assumptions, particularly the defence of nudity as natural. What nudism ultimately exposes is how the body figures at the intersection of nature and culture, the individual and the social, the private and the public.

This highly original work will find an audience among students and scholars of Canadian history and those more broadly interested in transnational histories of the body, gender and sexuality, and childhood. General readers of Canadian history and the history of the postwar period will also put it on their reading lists.

杏吧原创 the Author:

Mary-Ann Shantz is a historian, researcher, and project manager who lives in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a contributor to Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History and has been published in Histoire sociale/Social History and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

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Alum Chantal Brousseau’s work was featured in .

鈥淎ll of our civilizations are documented in one way or another, whether that鈥檚 oral history or written documents,鈥� says聽Chantal Brousseau, a masters student of history at 杏吧原创 University in Canada who helped develop a tool to help compile archaeological data for the project. 鈥淏ut we don鈥檛 have any sort of documentation about life in space as it is now.鈥�

The post What an Extraterrestrial Archaeological Dig Could Tell Us 杏吧原创 Space Culture appeared first on Department of History.

From June 17 to 21, at the 杏吧原创 University Fieldhouse, the community will come together to celebrate spring convocation. The ceremonies will honour more than 5,200 students as they receive their degrees.

Below is the excerpt from Elizabeth Kane’s article, “,” with the full post available online.

Anna-Karina Tabu帽ar, Master of Arts, History with Specialization in Accessibility

Anna-Karina Tabu帽ar is the first student to graduate with 杏吧原创鈥檚 new specialization in Accessibility Studies. The Master of Arts (History) student came to 杏吧原创 with an established career 鈥� as a journalist and founder of a communications agency.

鈥淢y professional work has been steeped in disability and inclusion for the past decade,鈥� she says. It has been informed by her experience living with a disability after she developed a rare variant of Guillain-Barre syndrome.

During the pandemic, she was drawn to the emerging issue of reintegration of employees that suffered from long COVID.

鈥淚 wanted to be able to study this issue so that I could better serve my clients with a deeper understanding of an emerging cohort of employees.鈥� says Tabu帽ar.

In her search for the right academic fit, Tabu帽ar came across 杏吧原创鈥檚 new specialization.

鈥淚 found out that 杏吧原创 was offering this great program that would include critical disability studies and inclusive design,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 thought: This is exactly what I want to do.鈥�

Her final research project involved the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, which was running one of the first long COVID rehabilitation programs in Canada. Her project documented and analyzed the evolution of the program, as well as the societal factors and medical histories that shaped its roll-out.

鈥淚t鈥檚 very important to shift the conventional notion of disability as a static, stable, visible condition,鈥� she says. 鈥淚n fact, the majority of people with disabilities have dynamic and invisible disabilities which shape the ways they work and function.鈥�

Her studies helped to complement her work outside of academia. She recently concluded an independent research project commissioned by Accessibility Standards Canada exploring episodic disabilities in the federal public service.

鈥淭his final report can help inform accessibility standards and impact federal departments, organizations and federally regulated industries,鈥� says Tabu帽ar.

As she prepares to leave 杏吧原创, she underscores the importance of everyone in the community taking an active role in accessibility 鈥� both on and off campus.

鈥淎ccessibility is not just about building a ramp,鈥� says Tabu帽ar. 鈥淎ccessibility is the everyday actions that show 杏吧原创 is living the values of being one of the most accessible universities in Canada.鈥�

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Krenare Recaj, PhD Candidate, has written an article for Active History reflecting on her PhD training. An excerpt is included below with the full article, “,” available online.

In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail 鈥� showing photos and drawings 鈥� of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly appreciate the gravity of the suffering. Sitting in the same place I sat no matter the class 鈥� last row, closest to the exit 鈥� I could see the laptop screens in front of me. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Online Shopping. Suddenly the professor鈥檚 alarm went off. He stopped mid gruesome detail, and told us it was time for the 20 minute break. I sat in the hallway with Jeremy and tried to hide my tears. I couldn鈥檛 reconcile the fact that while listening to the darkest depths of human suffering, the worst moments of real human lives, I too was scrolling Twitter. What does that say about our attention spans, I wondered? But more importantly, what does that say about our humanity? Jeremy is both kind and disciplined. He was one of a small handful of students in the entire class that was not scrolling the internet that day. He told me that I was being too hard on myself, and that maybe scrolling is how students coped with the heaviness of the class content. I told him that when I was in high school, I painted the words 鈥渁pathy is the enemy鈥� on my walls. I felt the weight of those words in that moment and promised both Jeremy and myself that I would never treat human suffering as dismissively as I had that day. After the break, I sat back down in the lecture hall, ready to take more notes on human suffering. My hand twitched. I kept nearly opening another tab.

Had callousness become a reflex?

I wish I could say that I haven鈥檛 opened Twitter in class since that day. But I can鈥檛. However, that day has never left me. I have since spent a lot of time wondering what it means to be a historian. Not what it means for humanity, but what it means for the soul. I have tried to be intentional about how I study history and how I process the trauma experienced by others. I have tried to remind myself that human suffering is still suffering, whether it happened a millennium ago, a century ago, a decade ago, or yesterday. I have tried, and failed, but really really tried to center dignity even if it often feels like I am making a career out of the suffering of others. I work on histories of displacement involving the Kosovar Albanian diaspora, a history that I am bound up with. As I embarked on graduate studies I was determined not to sacrifice my humanity for a career鈥� or that鈥檚 what I told myself at least.

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Krenare Recaj, PhD Candidate, and History Professors Norman Hillmer and Laura Madokoro have been awarded a for an upcoming conference titled “Memory, Politics, and Precedent: Canada and the Kosovar Refugee Diaspora 25 Years On”. The conference will be held on 2 November 2024 at the University of Toronto and is being organized in conjunction with colleagues from the Munk Centre, Pier 21, the Canadian Immigration Historical Society as well as numerous Kosovar Albanian community associations. Stay tuned for details!

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PhD student No毛 Bourdeau presented preliminary research findings from his dissertation at Professor Zoe Waxman’s part of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Bourdeau’s research bridges the fields of Holocaust studies and transgender studies to foreground the role of gender mutability across identities during the Third Reich and Shoah. Drawing on select oral-history interviews and life-writing documents from archives such as the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, it identifies moments of gendered boundary crossing in testimony documents to explore how a trans* reading of these sources can expand ways of thinking about sexuality, gender, emotions, survival, and power in the context of the Holocaust. The goals include resurfacing aspects of this history that have been obscured within current methodological frameworks. Burgeoning literature on LGBTQ+ history during the Third Reich has focused primarily on criminal, legal and medical documentation. It expands the scope of this scholarship by extending trans* analysis to oral-history interviews to further consider gender as performative, non-static and situated in specific times and places. Bourdeau’s research enhances understandings of how gender variance appeared, as historian Laurie Marhoefer has suggested, in situations characterized by emotion, choice, and risk. In this way, the project represents a robust investigation into the conditions of gender non-normativity in the context of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

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Public History MA student Holly Benison has created a cooking show as part of her master’s thesis project. A short excerpt can be found below with the full article by Alyssa Tremblay, “,” available online.

From green corn patties to preserved apples, public history student Holly Benison is teaching people around the world how to cook like a 19th-century Canadian immigrant through her YouTube video series, 鈥�.鈥�

Half cooking show and half history lesson, the series is actually part of Benison鈥檚 master鈥檚 thesis project at 杏吧原创 University.

Instead of writing a traditional paper, she鈥檚 studying women鈥檚 work and culinary history in the mid-1800s by creating educational videos in which she recreates recipes and techniques from the 1854 book The Female Emigrant鈥檚 Guide by Upper Canada author and naturalist Catherine Parr Trail.

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Ph.D. student Tyla Betke has just had a paper published in the The Canadian Historical Review. The abstract is posted below while the full paper, “” is available online.

This article examines how the network of settler colonial systems in Canada worked to ensure the widespread and intentional cover-up that allowed one man to remain in the Indian Residential School (IRS) system for over two decades (from 1910 to 1932) despite overwhelming evidence of his abuse. Using genocide scholar Andrew Woolford’s metaphor of settler colonial mesh as a framework, this article details the 1930 case against Birtle Indian Residential School Principal Henry B. Currie to understand the multiple strategies of concealment used to protect him. A multitude of actors and institutions were involved in the coverup: the Indian agent and the Department of Indian Affairs, the Presbyterian Church, the court systems, and the public press. Strategies of concealment included blatant bribery, transferring accused principals to other schools, document falsification, forced marriages, and misreporting runaways, along with the IRS system itself, which kept children from their families and support systems. The article concludes with a discussion of settler claims of ignorance and the role archives play in revealing the truth about abusers within the IRS system.

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Congratulations to PhD Candidate Krenare Recaj on the publication of her children鈥檚 book, 鈥溾�� based in part on her doctoral research, which explores the history of the Kosovar Albanian refugee movement and diaspora. The book has garnered a great deal of and been toasted by the Kosovar Consulate in Canada. Congratulations Krenare!

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