Tuesday, May 18, 2010


Stand and Deliver:
Three Doctoral SSHRC Awards for Our Students

From community identities to highwaymen to Aboriginal blankets... You might think me biased when I say that our graduate students are coming up with rather cool research projects, but the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council agree. This year, three of our students won awards to undertake doctoral research projects.

Carla Fehr received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship to research the pressures on community resources in several Guatemalan communities from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th century. She will explore the community identity that often forms around struggles to resist dispossession of resources. At the time of writing, she has not yet decided whether she will stay at the U of S or go to McGill for her Ph.D.

Kurt Krueger received a doctoral SSHRC and is off to the University of Victoria to work with Andrea Mackenzie. Kurt will be looking at highway robbery, particularly considering the intersection of masculinity, crime and culture in eighteenth-century Britain.

Katya MacDonald, who also received a doctoral SSHRC, will be staying at the U of S to work with Keith Carlson. Katya will be researching how blankets have featured in and represented historical narrative in Aboriginal communities.

Congratulations and good luck to our soon-to-be graduated graduates who will be moving on to their new projects in the autumn!

Image: Dick Turpin, Highwayman
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Monday, May 17, 2010


Tommy Douglas and the RCMP

Our own Bill Waiser and Steve Hewitt (department alumnus now working at the University of Birmingham) were interviewed by CBC's Michael Enright on the RCMP surveillance of Tommy Douglas over three decades. The subject of the show explores why those files are closed till this day.

This fascinating interview is still available as a podcast (May 16, The Sunday Edition) at:

Image: Premier Douglas, talking with Private Campbell of the Saskatoon Light Infantry (M.G.), Barneveld, Netherlands, 29 April 1945
Image Credit: Library and Archives Canada, PA-138035; Mikan ID 3524858.