The Department notes with great sadness the passing of , a colleague, friend, mentor, prominent military and social historian, academic administrator, and inspiration to many. Desmond Morton was Hiram Mills Emeritus Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies.
A multilingual scholar, Lorenz LĂĽthi works on Cold War issues from an international perspective investigating how the structure of the international system interacts with ideologies. His work on the Sino-Soviet split changed the whole field of investigation. His current research focuses on the global Cold War in three distinct but related regions: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia linking Cold War aspects of national and international history across continents.
Hans Beck’s path-breaking work has led to major innovations in the study of ancient Greek and Roman political culture. Beyond the Mediterranean World, he is an active agent in the development of international research networks in comparative history, including comparisons with ancient China. His prolific output informs contemporary debates about local and global paradigms, the relationship between ethnicity and federalism, and the modes of economic cooperation in federal systems.
Prof. Travis Bruce has won an FRQSC Grant to conduct research on commercial translators and translations between the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in the Medieval Mediterranean. He is particularly interested in studying commercial translators, known as dragomans, who played a mundane but still central role as essential agents in maintaining the foundations of Mediterranean society, facilitating the networks that bound together the ports, markets, and courts of the Mediterranean.
Prof. Heaman has won the Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research: The Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for her book Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). Using extensive archival research from private papers, commissions, the press, and the government, Prof. Heaman shows that the Constitutional Act of 1867 was about the need for Canadians to write a new tax deal that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations.
Prof. John Zucchi has won a SSHRC Insight Grant for his new research project “Late Nineteenth Century Failed Group Migrations: Why did prospective migrants subscribe to migration scams?” which focuses on migrants particularly from Quebec and Britain to Brazil. Generally, migrants relied on pre-existing migratory networks. Prof. Zucchi, however, is interested in exploring an understudied group of people, who responded quickly to advertisements that promised unrealistic opportunities.
Professor James Krapfl received the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2017-18. The award is given each year by the Faculty of Arts to a professor in recognition of outstanding teaching achievements. Professor Krapfl will accept the award at Convocation on June 4, 2018.
Congratulations!
Professor James Krapfl will spend six months in the academic year 2018-19 as a fellow at the Imre KertĂ©sz Kolleg in Jena. He will be working on his project “The Other 1968: A Cultural History of East Central Europe in the Prague Spring Era,” which compares mentalities and patterns of political engagement in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland at the grassroots level in the late 1960s. Affiliated with the Friedrich Schiller University, the Kolleg is an institute for advanced study focusing on twentieth-century east central and southeastern Europe.Â
Congratulations
Professor Elsbeth Heaman won the 2018 Canada Prize of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (English language category) for her latest book Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017). The prize is "awarded to books that make an exceptional contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written, and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada."
Congratulations!
In his new book MAD FLIGHT? The Quebec Emigration to the Coffee Plantations of Brazil (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Professor John Zucchi reconstructs the 1896 rush of one thousand Quebeckers to find riches on the coffee plantations in Santos (Brazil), and how this adventure ended for many in poverty, tragedy, and even death. Most survivors returned penniless to Canada. The Mad Flight was widely reported in newspapers at the time, but is completely forgotten today.
Professor Lynn Kozak uses her sabbatical leave for an exciting and public performance-based research-creation project. The FRQSC-funded Previously On...the Iliad explores research questions about episode construction and narrative strategies in the Iliad. Each weekly performance of a part of Iliad pursues a distinct direction of academic inquiry. The public is invited to Bar des Pins on Avenue du Parc to witness as this research-creation project live each Monday evening.Â
Professor Elsbeth Heaman was promoted to full professor in early 2018. Originally from British Columbia, she earned her B.A. and M.A. in our department and then went to the University of Toronto for her Ph.D. Early in her career, she published two books on exhibitions in Canadian society in the 19th century and on St. Mary's hospital, London's great teaching hospital and pre-eminent site for medical education in England. In 2015 and 2017, two books on state formation, political economy, and social history in Canada followed.
Professor Allan Downey’s first book, The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood, has been published by University of British Columbia Press in February 2018. The game of lacrosse has been a central element of many Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities.
Professor Allan Greer’s new book Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2018. In the book, he examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England.