Tuesday, June 26, 2007

What's Up is currently on summer hiatus, but History never sleeps and so there will be much to catch up on and report when the academic sap rises in September. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, however, we here at What's Up interrupt this hiatus to bring you news of a great honour just now bestowed upon one of our own.

Bill Waiser has just been elected to the Royal Society of Canada. If Bill wore skates to work it would be like being elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame, except that Bill is very much not retired. The citation for Bill's nomination reads as follows:
W.A. (Bill) Waiser combines an impressive record of scholarly publication with effective communication of scholarship to the general public and service to his professional peers to make a profound contribution both to the academic world and Canada's general citizenry. His scholarship always ties the western region on which it is focused to the wider concerns and interests of the nation of which the West is a part, and he regularly communicates his findings to the general public through television and the press. These practices extend Waiser's valuable scholarship from the ivory tower to the public square.
If you would like to congratulate Bill personally, you can do so by turning out to the McNally Robinson bookstore in Saskatoon at 7:pm on July 3rd, where Bill will be signing copies of Everett Baker's Saskatchewan, a book of photos Bill selected and described drawn from Everett Baker's remarkable Kodachrome slides of Saskatchewan life between 1937 and the 1960s.