The George Grantham Bain Collection of photographs at the Library of Congress contains images from one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection documents sports events, celebrities, theater, crime, strikes, disasters, and political activities, mainly from 1900 to the mid-1920s, but including some images from as early as 1860. Catalog records and high resolution digital images have recently been added for 11,000 glass negatives, joining the 1,200 photographic prints already represented online. More negatives will go online in the coming months. Click here to check it out.

Congratulations to Steve Hewitt (MA 1992, Ph.D. 1997) who has landed a permanent position in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, at the University of Birmingham, England. See what Steve is up to or contact him at http://www.uscanada.bham.ac.uk/staff/hewitt.htm.

Congratulations to Bill Waiser, whose t.v. series Looking Back has just been released on DVD for use in Saskatchewan schools, as part of the Social Studies curriculum. The DVD is not available for sale to the public, but the book of the series, Looking Back - True Tales from Saskatchewan's Past was published by Fifth House in 2003. Click here to learn more about the book.

Aware the Ides of March! Our good friends at the Museum of Antiquities are sponsoring an Ides of March Classical Quiz Night on, of course, March 15th, at 7pm in room 12 of the Main Library. Test your knowledge of the ancient and medieval world amidst a raucous evening of fun and friendly team competion. Cost is $10 per person with advance registration (before March 4th), and $12 thereafter. Click here for more details.

Congratulations to Dr. Angela Wanhalla, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Native-Newcomer Relations, who has accepted a tenure-track position in History at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Fortunately for us, Angela will be able to stay here until the end of August.

History Graduate Student Colloquium. This month's colloquium features papers by Karen Sander on "Women and Debt in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due", and Jean Ruiz, whose title will be announced on the night. Thursday, February 24. 7:30 pm, Faculty Club basement. Faculty, grad, and honours students.

History Department Research Workshop Series. Angela Wanhalla will present her paper, "Mapping, Contesting and Trangressing Boundaries at the Taieri Native Reserve, Otago, New Zealand, 1844-1868". Friday, February 25th, Boffins, 3:30pm. Faculty and invited guests.

CMRS Colloquium. Taneli Kukkonen, University of Victoria will be presenting "Creation in Greek Philosophy, Medieval, and Renaissance Perspectives." Monday, February 28th, STM 344B, refreshments 3:30, talk at 4:00. Everyone welcome.

HUSA Film Night. This year's wildly successful history film series continues with director Agnieska Holland's acclaimed Europa, Europa, winner of the Golden Globe for best foreign film of 1991. Based on an autobiography by Solomon Perel, the film concerns a Jewish-German boy who manages to conceal his identity from the Nazis and ends up a member of their Youth Party. Introduced by Mark Meyers. Wednesday, February 23rd, 6:30 pm, Arts 242 (Place Riel Theatre). Free. Everyone welcome.

ECCO: The University Library is offering trial access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which delivers the full text of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Subject areas covered include history, geography, fine arts, social sciences, medicine, science, technology, literature, language, religion, philosophy, law, and general reference. To try out this latest treasure trove, click here. Note that the trial ends March 5th.

The College of Graduate Studies and Research and the Graduate Students’ Association invites grad students to submit a paper for the 13th Annual University of Saskatchewan Graduate Student Conference. This year's theme is “Interdisciplinarity: Methodologies and Practices in Academia”, and presenters are encouraged to organize and develop their research and arguments through the vein of interdisciplinarity; considering questions such as: how does an interdisciplinary approach enhance or decrease specific research, is interdisciplinary studies beneficial to research, or does it diminish the product? What is interdisciplinarity? Are some disciplines more open to interdisciplinarity than others? Having said all that, the organizers are disarmingly honest (would that other conference organizers were so honest) in admitting that "Submissions need to be only marginally related to the theme."

Submissions are welcome from graduate students in Master’s, Doctoral, Post-Doctoral, and related graduate student programs, and from either full-time or part-time graduate students.

Abstracts of no longer than 250 words must be submitted by Monday, February 28, 2005. Abstracts may be submitted by e-mail to gsa_admn@duke.usask.ca.

Congratulations to John McCannon, who has just published "The Pole Is Ours! The Dilemmas of Exploration, Development, and Science in Arctic Siberia during the 1930s," in The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East, ed. Eva-Maria Stolberg. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005. Click here and then scroll down to read more about the book.

Kalamazoo Bound: Frank Klaassen and Sharon Wright offer the following astounding opportunity to students:
"A number of students (grads and undergrads) have expressed interest in going to the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan Thursday-Sunday, May 5-8, 2005. The atmosphere is comfortable and the congress is huge (3-4000 attendees and 40 concurrent sessions over 4 days). The program is posted on the web site (link below). For any student centrally interested in topics between 300 and 1600 AD this is a very good conference to attend. In fact, we believe it is CRUCIAL that any graduate students at the U of S working on medieval topics go [and return - ed.]. Sharon and I plan to drive down with any students who want to go (yes, you heard that correctly). We assume the trip will take about 25 hours each way. The savings should be relatively substantial as a result. We also expect to be able to have some of the trip subsidized by the university under programs for grads and undergrads. The cost of registration is $80US for students and accomodation can be had for $26US/night (double occupancy). (Students may, of course, wish to bring sleeping bags and sleep 4 to a room, reducing that cost to $13.) You can eat in the cafeteria (see web page) or at nearby restaurants. We often bought cheese, bread, and fruit and had picnics in our student days. We should have more information about the possibility of subsidies and the cost of transportation at the meeting."

For more information about the congress click here

All faculty, grad and undergrad students interested should attend the Organizational Meeting for the Trip to International Medieval Congress. Monday February 7, 2005, 4:30 p.m., Arts 710.

The Psychology Department is sponsoring a talk by Ulrich Teucher, University of Nottingham, on Community, Self, & Place: Cultural knowledge in Native and non-Native Youth, on Monday February 7th, 4-5pm at STM Room 344B. Dr. Teucher is a candidate for the advertised position in Culture & Human Development.

Call for Papers: Histories of editions. European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS) Conference, December 16-17, 2005, Amsterdam. The conference will focus on the ways in which specific texts have been edited throughout history. The aim is to chart tendencies that mark different periods in the history of scholarly editing by examining the evolution of editing older and classic texts such as the Divina Commedia, the Nibelungen sagas, the Canterbury Tales, Esopet, the Bible. Interested scholars are invited to write an abstract for papers that follow the editorial tradition of a text, either within a specific historical period or leading up to the present day, including new developments in electronic editing. Abstracts (300 words) for 20-minute papers can be sent to the chairman of the academic programme committee: herman.brinkman@chi.knaw.nl. Deadline for abstracts: March 1, 2005. Click here for further details.

The University of Saskatchewan library has acquired a subscription to the full-text catalog of Proquest Dissertations and Theses (formerly Proquest Digital Dissertations). For U. of S. library users, this means that most M.A. and Ph.D. dissertations produced in North Amercan universities (and many written at U.K. universities) since 1997 are available immediately and in their entirety as .pdf files. Having opened the file, the search facilty in Adobe Reader can provide a de facto index. Note that some older dissertations have been made available as well: What's Up found a still-relevant Yale doctoral dissertation from 1939, in its entirety. Faculty and grad students will find this a treasure trove of vital scholarly work, much of it state-of-the-art, and advanced undergrads will also want to avail themselves of this latest remarkable addition to our university holdings. U. of S. users can click here to see for themselves. (What's Up tip #314: having searched and found a likely item, click "Page Image pdf" to open the dissertation. If you double-click on the title, however you will be taken to a page inviting you to pay $38 US for the same privilege. Try to resist the impulse to pay.)

The University of York (U.K.) will open a Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies on 1 October 2005, under the directorship of Professors David Wooton (History) and William Sherman (English). The Centre will sponsor two international conferences in the summer of 2006: '"Shrews" on the Renaissance Stage' (26-27 May 2006) and 'Rethinking the Baroque'. The Centre is also inviting applications for three-year doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships. A dedicated website will follow shortly. In the meantime, click here to learn more about the doctoral fellowships, and here for the postdoctoral (deadline for the latter is 17 February, 2005).