Wednesday, October 29, 2003

CALL FOR PAPERS
Saskatchewan Centennial History Conference

Regina, Saskatchewan: September 8-10, 2005

In recognition of Saskatchewan's centennial, the universities of Regina and Saskatchewan will be hosting a multidisciplinary conference at the historic Hotel Saskatchewan in Regina in early September 2005. The conference will open with an evening reception at Government House on Thursday, September 8. Two days of sessions at the Hotel Saskatchewan will follow on the Friday and Saturday. Friday night will feature the screening of films made to commemorate past provincial anniversaries. The conference will conclude with a banquet on Saturday night.
Papers and/or panel presentations are invited in, but not excluded to, the following general areas. There will be no concurrent sessions.

Gender roles
Saskatchewan in Canada and the wider world (Saskatchewan on the national and/or international stage)
Depictions of Saskatchewan (film, art, literature, etc)
Turning Points and Big Personalities
Migration (to, from, inside)
Diversity
Aboriginal
The Economy: Agriculture, Diversification (private v. public, etc), Labour, and Cooperatives
Tensions (north./south; rural/urban; agriculture/resource, aboriginal/non-aboriginal, etc)
Government and Politics

A one-page proposal and one-page curriculum vitae should be sent to Bill Waiser, Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5A5 or emailed to waiser@duke.usask.ca by January 15, 2004.
Chris Kent and Gordon DesBrisay are just back from the annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, held this year in Portland, Oregon. Chris spoke on "Victorian Clubland and the 'Crisis of Masculinity'", and Gordon's paper was entitled "Father Knows Best? Patriarchy, Quakers, and Family Relations". For a sense of what's up in British History, check out the conference program at http://www.nacbs.org/03ann.pdf.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Bring out your dead! The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is now available online -- a major resource for faculty and students that features entries on hundreds of prominent Canadians who died between the years 1,000 and 1920. Check it out at http://www.biographi.ca/EN/index.html.

Monday, October 27, 2003

Reminder: Jim Miller has been honoured once again. He is giving the prestigious STM Michael Keenan Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, 28 October 2002 at 7:30 PM in the Fr. O'Donnell Theatre (STM). The title of his presentation is: "Compact, Contract, Covenant: Canada's Treaty-Making Tradition". Reception to follow. Everyone welcome.
A reminder to those of you who have booked in for Lisa Smith's presentation to the Eighteenth Century Studies Research Unit, which is tomorrow night (Tuesday, Oct. 28) at the Faculty Club, 6:30 for drinks, 7:00 for dinner. The topic is "Trust and the 'Unruly' Patient in the Eighteenth Century".

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

This coming Saturday, October 25, is Fall Convocation, and the department is proud to announce that 18 undergraduates and 4 MA students will be collecting history degrees. In addition, Jim Handy will be honoured with the George Ivany Internationalization Award. Faculty attending Convocation should assemble in the Paramount Room no later than 8:20 AM. For information about tickets and gowns contact, Shelly Van Buskirk at 6744.
The department wishes to extend its sincere thanks to members of the HUSA executive who helped out at the Experience US! open house for high schoolers last week. Paget Code, Omeasoo Butt, Christina Winter, Chris Phillips, Laura Mitchell, and Greg Froh all helped us put our best foot forward.

Thanks, too, to faculty Dave De Brou, Pam Jordan, Lisa Smith, Louis Stiles, Frank Klaassen, John Porter and, as ever, anyone What's Up has forgotten, for all your help.
An early reminder that the November History Graduate Student Colloquium will be held on Wednesday, November 20, 2003 in the Fireside Room of the Faculty Club, at 7:30 pm.
Congratulations to Janice MacKinnon and Bill Waiser for their Saskatchewan Book Awards Shortlist Nominations. Janice's Minding the Public Purse was shortlisted for two categories: Nonfiction and Scholarly Writing. For more on Janice's book, see http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1579.

Bill's All Hell Can't Stop US received nominations in three categories: Book of the Year, Nonfiction, and the Saskatoon Book Award. Check it out at http://sask.cbc.ca/archives/riot/excerpt.html.

And to read more on the awards shortlist, see http://www.bookawards.sk.ca/ .

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

HUSA is having a clothing sale this week in the Arts tunnel between 10:30 and 2:30 daily. Sweatshirts, t-shirts, the nine yards -- and all adorned with the HUSA logo on the front and George Bernard Shaw on the back: "The only thing we learn from history is that people don't learn from history." How can you resist?

Friday, October 17, 2003

FINAL CALL Attention students! The university library is hosting a workshop for history students, Finding Resources for Term Papers in History, on Friday, October 17th from 1 to 3pm. The session will cover using the catalogue and finding journal articles using the electronic databases. For further information, contact Shirley Martin, Library Instruction Coordinator, at 966-6030. (If you are a faculty person, please tell your students, and if you are a student, tell all your friends.)
FINAL CALL: Attention Undergrads! On Friday, October 17, the Department of History will be holding a workshop on how to apply for graduate programs and scholarships. The workshop will be held in Arts 103 from 3-5 pm. Everyone welcome. If you are even thinking of grad school, next year or in future years, this is one meeting you won't want to miss. For further details, contact the Undergrad Chair, Martha Smith-Norris.

Thursday, October 16, 2003

HUSA presents a free screening of John Ford's classic anti-western western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring James Stewart and John Ford, on October 23rd at 6:30 pm in Arts 134. The film, like the discussion to follow led by Keith Carlson, interrogates myths of the Old West. Everyone welcome.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Jeff Wigelsworth, a Ph.D. candidate in our department, has just published an article entitled "Competing to Popularize Newtonian Philosophy: John Theophilus Desaguliers and the Preservation of Reputation," Isis 94 (2003): 435-455. If you are a U of S library user, you can read Jeff's article here at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/Isis/journal/contents/v94n3.html

Keeping busy, Jeff will be presenting a paper entitled "English Deists as Heretical Newtonians" at the History of Science Society Conference in Cambridge, MA on 22 November 2003.
Attention Undergrads! On Friday, October 17, the Department of History will be holding a workshop on how to apply for graduate programs and scholarships. The workshop will be held in Arts 103 from 3-5 pm. Everyone welcome. If you are even thinking of grad school, next year or in future years, this is one meeting you won't want to miss. For further details, contact the Undergrad Chair, Martha Smith-Norris.
The Department of Economics is pleased to announce that Professor Herschel I. Grossman from the Department of Economics at Brown University will deliver this year's Timlin Lecture, "Choosing Between Peace and War", in the St. Thomas More College Auditorium, Monday, October 27, 2003, at 7:30 p.m. A reception will follow, all welcome.
Bill Waiser, whose many publication credits include the first editions of What's Up, back when it was taped to the wall by the seventh floor elevator, recently published a new book, All Hell Can't Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot (Fifth House, 2003). Congratulations, Bill! For an excerpt, see http://sask.cbc.ca/archives/riot/excerpt.html

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

John Porter's article, "Orestes the Ephebe," has recently appeared in E. Csapo and M.C. Miller, eds., Poetry, Theory, Praxis: The Social Life of Myth, Word and Image in Ancient Greece. Essays in Honour of William J. Slater (Oxford, 2003) 146-77. The paper examines the assimilation of young men to women in Greek literature and art, and argues that this process of assimilation informs the portrayal of young men on the Euripidean stage.
Myra Rutherdale, a Canada Research Chair Postdoctoral Fellow in our department, will be giving a paper October 18th to the Ontario Women's History Network at Queen's University in Kingston, entitled "Dentistry, Diagnosis, and Diphtheria: Nursing in Canada's North, 1945-70."
John McCannon recently had his article "By the Shores of White Waters: The Altai and Its Place in the Spiritual Geopolitics of Nicholas Roerich" published in the journal Sibirica: Journal of Siberian Studies. This month, his essay "Tabula Rasa in the North: The Soviet Arctic and Mythic Landscapes in Stalinist Popular Culture" appeared in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Stalinist Space, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, and published by University of Washington Press.
Lorraine Freeman and Nellie Larocque of the Metis Resource Centre, Winnipeg, will speak on the "Claiming Ourselves Genealogical Project", Friday October 24th, 2-3:30 pm in 106 Biology. Their talk is sponsored by the Saskatchewan Genealogical Society and the U of S, and everyone is welcome.
Frank Klaassen's article, 'Medieval Ritual Magic in the Renaissance' was published this past July in the European journal Aries. At the end of October, Frank will be giving a paper entitled "Sex, Learning, Fraternity, and Influence: Masculinity in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Ritual Magic Manuals" at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Pittsburgh.
Attention students! The university library is hosting a workshop for history students, Finding Resources for Term Papers in History, on Friday, October 17th from 1 to 3pm. The session will cover using the catalogue and finding journal articles using the electronic databases. For further information, contact Shirley Martin, Library Instruction Coordinator, at 966-6030. (If you are a faculty person, please tell your students, and if you are a student, tell all your friends.)
Jim Miller will deliver the seventeenth annual Michael Keenan Lecture at St. Thomas More College, Fr. O'Donnell Theatre, Tuesday, October 28 at 7:30 pm. The lecture is entitled "Compact, Contract, Covenant: Canada's Treaty-Making Tradition". All are welcome, and a reception will follow.

Monday, October 13, 2003

This year's Experience US recruitment open house takes place Thursday, Oct. 16 & Friday, October 17, when our campus will once again be inundated with Grade 12 students from around the province. The College of Arts and Science considers this an excellent opportunity to attract prospective students. Rest assured that the History Department, ably assisted by student representatives from HUSA, will be there making our pitch. For details as to exact time and location, see http://www.arts.usask.ca/experienceus/.
John Porter will be delivering the paper, "'You're a woman: you swear brazenly': Plautus, Amphitruo 831-836 and the Adulteress' Deceptive Oath," to the CMRS Faculty Colloquium on Thursday October 16th at 4:00 in the Window Room of the Faculty Club. (Refreshments and general socializing begin at 3:30.) Professor Porter's paper deals with a tradition of chastity oaths that extends from Hammurabi's Babylon to the administration of William Jefferson Clinton. The talk focuses in particular on a wide-spread tradition of folk tales that deal with the cunning ways in which adulterous women, compelled to attest to their wifely fidelity on pain of some terrible punishment, manage to circumvent the oath through some clever legalistic quibble.

Friday, October 10, 2003

The Teaching and Learning Centre is offering a free workshop for T.A.'s on October 29: Motivating First Year Students, presented by History stalwarts Jim Handy and Jason Zorbas. For information about this and other workshops for Grad Students, go to http://www.usask.ca/tlc/gs_dev_days.html
Ever wonder what you were missing by not studying early modern history? The answer is dinner. The Eighteenth Century Studies Research Unit (whose members sprawl well before and occasionally after said century) sponsors convivial dinner-talks for faculty and grad students. Following a sumptuous feast on October 28th, our medical historian Lisa Smith will speak on Trust and the 'Unruly' Patient in the Eighteenth Century. To whet your appetite and make reservations, see http://www.usask.ca/ecs-at-uofs/news.html.
At this year’s Fall Convocation (Saturday, October 25th) Jim Handy will receive the J.W. George Ivany Internationalization Award in honour of his extraordinary contributions toward the internationalization of the University. Anyone who knows Jim can attest to his unceasing efforts on behalf of the International Studies program, a wide array of other internationalizing initiatives on campus, and, perhaps most importantly, his founding of the Guatemala Term Abroad program. Congratulations, Jim. For further details and a photo that does not do him justice, see http://www.usask.ca/communications/awards/handy.shtml
Janice MacKinnon has been appointed to the board of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, an independent, non-partisan national think-tank that aims to improve public policy in Canada. Janice has been focussing her teaching and research on public policy since returning to our department after years of service as a cabinet minister in Regina. Congratulations, Janice. For further details, see http://www.usask.ca/events/news/articles/20031009-1.html
Elizabeth Scott (BA hons 2003 and currently enrolled in our M.A. program) is one of ten winners of the Canadian Undergraduate Essay Contest in British Studies, sponsored by the North American Conference on British Studies and the British Council. The essay, Little Bodies: Children’s Bodies and Children’s Medicine in Early Modern England, was written for Lisa Smith’s History 398: Healing and Illness in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800. Congratulations, Liz! Our department has had a winner in each of the two years the contest has run (Jennifer Robertson was the first) and this seems a tradition well worth continuing.