Concordia University Department of History

Welcome back from break everyone! We've just heard the terrific news that two of our MA students, Genevieve Riou and Tom Fraser, are among the three finalists for the Viv Nelles Essay Prize, awarded by the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History for the graduate student paper that "best places Canada in a transnational framework." Each of their submissions were written last semester as part of Andrew Ivaska's Transnational Networks in Modern Times seminar: Thomas Fraser, "...Canadian Pension Funds and Global Real Estate Investment" Genevieve Riou, "D'une ile a l'autre: Transnational Activism, Memory, and Other Trajectories in Haitian-Montrealer Life Stories during the Duvalier Era" And here's the link to the announcement: https://thenewcanadianhistory.com//2020-wilson-prize-fin/ Congratulations Genevieve and Tom! Well done!!

Pleased to report that Max Bergholz recently published a short piece about the transformational experience of field research. He was invited to write this text by a colleague who runs the "Invisible Histories" project, which deals with the intersection between photography and historical research, and is hosted by Harvard's Center for History and Economics. https://histecon.fas.harvard.edu//c/being_there/index.html

As well, Alison has seen the first part of her project with the Blavatnik Archive Foundation go live. She is (and we are!) pretty excited about it and the collaborations that will follow over the next 5 years or so. http://www.blavatnikarchive.org/collection/rowley Again: Well done Alison!!

Alison Rowley has published a new article: https://www.tandfonline.com/epri/EJYVZEP3Q7UGXXJ2YG2F/full Well done Alison!

Congratulations to Steven High on winning the Governor General's History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Burton Award. A fantastic achievement and we are very proud! Bravo!

Congratulations to Eric Reiter on winning the Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research for his book Wounded Feelings. A fantastic achievement and we are very proud! Bravo!

Earlier in the summer, Max Bergholz pubished a short book that emerged out of Max's 2019 Laura Shannon Prize Lecture at the Nanovic Institute https://twitter.com/NanovicND/status/1285668833152380928 Congratulations Max!

Congratulations to Eugene Miakinkov - who graduated from our program with an Honours degree - who has just published his first book. He is a lecturer at the University of Swansea in the UK. https://www.amazon.ca/War-Enlightenment-Russi//ref=sr_1_1

Anya Zilberstein published Food Matters: Critical Histories of Food and the Sciences, her co-edited volume of 16 essays plus her own co-written introductory essay has been published by the History of Science Society. It includes Ted McCormick’s essay Food, Population, and Empire in the Hartlib Circle, 16391660. Congratulations to Anya and to Ted!

Congratulations to Sarah Ghabrial who edited a special section "Race, Law, and Exception" in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The section features four essays including Sarah's own article entitled, "Reading Agamben from Algiers: The Racial Metonymy of Permanent Exception." Link to the issue: https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/issue/40/2 "ABSTRACT: The main intervention of this special section is to identify and reposition race and colonial la...w as (conspicuously) absent referents in widely accepted genealogies of the state of exceptionmost notably, that of Giorgio Agambenand to offer methodological pathways, based on historical and contemporary examples, of how colonial legal histories might be written back into this history. Collectively, these essays attempt to show how race thinking and exception each operate as the other's alibi: exception instantiating and substantiating race difference, and race difference justifying exception and ushering its expansion and normalization in steadily more realms of law and life. In so doing, this special section proposes at least three possible avenues of further inquiry, each of which builds on and into the other: First, by virtue of their geographic and temporal scope, these essays signal a way of approaching sovereignty and exception not as totalizing and synthetic, but rather as multivalent, recursive, and regenerative. Second, the designation of partial personhood or disabled citizenship is offered as a way of conceptually traversing trans-Mediterranean and trans-Atlantic historical experiences and legal traditions. Third, these essays signal the need for more sustained exploration at the nexus of law, labor, and violence." Congratulations Sarah!

Hello History peeps! Now that things have settled down a bit (but this is still a weird semester!), we thought we would play "catch-up" with a few late announcements. So watch this space!

This is a fantastic project! Congratulations to Shannon and Alice Reiter on such a great job!

Peter Gossage was quoted in this article in today’s Montreal Gazette.