Congratulations to Mark Meyers, who will spend 2005-2006 in Atlanta, Georgia as a fellow of Emory University's Center for Humanistic Inquiry. While in residence, Mark will begin a new project on the reconstruction of republican political culture in France after World War II and will offer an undergraduate seminar entitled "Gender, Sexuality, and Politics in Modern France."

Devoted readers of What's Up will know that doctoral candidate Brendan Edwards gave a paper in Windsor, England, last month at the Association for Commonwealth Studies conference. His talk caught the attention of John Fraser, Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto and academic affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail. Professor Fraser was moved to consult Brendan's recently published book, Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada Before 1960 (Scarecrow Press, 2005), and in his Globe column of June 18 he referred to it as "an almost ideal example of this phenomenon of academic scrutiny supporting aboriginal values. It takes a seemingly peripheral subject -- the history of libraries in aboriginal-European relations -- and brings it to bear on the larger story with solid research, inexorable logic and often devastating conclusions." Congratulations, Brendan. Click here to read more of John Fraser's review.

Congratulations to Julie Gibbings and Paul Jenkins, who were married on June 10th. They met while doing their MA's at the U of S, and are now pursuing doctorates at the universities of Wisconsin and Glasgow, respectively. Doctoral studies are intense. Paul, captured here trying to get a little work in, was soon coaxed back to the wedding festivities.

Congratulations to Karen Sander (BA hons, M.A. candidate) and Nathan Thomson, who were married June 11th, on a rare and perfect sunny day.

A Richly Deserved Honour:
Peter Bietenholz, Professor Emeritus in History (shown here with his wife Doris) was named the 2005 winner of The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies Lifetime Achievement Award at the Society's annual conference banquet, in conjunction with the Congress of Humanities and Fine Arts, at the University of Western Ontario, on May 30. Peter was in Europe and unable to attend, but he will receive an engraved plaque at the next conference banquet in May 2006. For Peter this is the latest landmark in a distinguished career in which he has published seven single-authored monographs, including History and Biography in the Work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Geneva 1966), Basle and France in the Sixteenth Century (Geneva 1971), Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden 1994), and Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678): Peace, Tolerance and God the One and Only (Florence 1997). He has also edited the works of Renaissance Latin writers, including poems and correspondence of Mino Celsi (Naples and Chicago, 1982) and four volumes of the Collected Works of Erasmus, the flagship project of the University of Toronto Press. A companion to that project, the Biographical Dictionary of the Contemporaries of Erasmus, was co-edited in three volumes with our own Tom Deutscher (Toronto 1985-87) and was reprinted in a one-volume paperback in 2004. Peter remains active in research (it is impossible to imagine him otherwise) since his retirement, preparing, among other publications, a monograph on radical readings of Erasmus' work from his death to the end of the seventeenth century. As everyone on or about the seventh floor has known for many years, Peter is both a resource and an inspiration to his colleagues in History and the CMRS. (Click on the photo to enlarge)

Proud Moment. As reported earlier, on May 19th Bill Waiser presented Queen Elizabeth (left) with an advance copy of Saskatchewan: A New History (Fifth House Press, 2005), as Marley Waiser and U of S President Peter Mackinnon looked on. Bill's book is the University's official centennial gift to the province. Bill has only so many copies to give away, but the book is now available for purchase, well in advance of the official publication date of September 1. In a ground-breaking reversal, the University Bookstore is selling the book for less than it would normally cost from other vendors: $40 as against the full price of $50. No household in Saskatchewan should be without one. (Click on photo to enlarge).

Congratultations to Michael Thome, who successfully defended his M.A. thesis, "Hon. Sir Frederick W.G. Haultain: A Political Biography 1905-1912", last week.

We here at What's Up have managed to miss the first showings of the hit British tv series, The Worst Jobs in History, a show that puts the antisocial back in social history. Happily, the series is shown on the History Channel, where it is never too soon to repeat things. The next showing is this Saturday at 3pm (5 EST). Check out the schedule by clicking here.

As of today, the British Library has begun to offer British Library Direct, a search-and-order service that allows readers to download or order on paper journal articles from a database of over 9 million articles (the last five year's worth of 20,000 journals). Many articles can be downloaded immediately as pdf files, readable with a standard free Adobe Reader program, but there is a fee for each download. It pays to look carefully, because it can be hard to distinguish a one-page book review from a thirty page article, though each costs £5 ($11.50 CDN) to download. Readers with online access to good university libraries, such as that of the U of S, will already have access to most online articles free of charge, and to interlibrary loan services to gather most of the others. Where time is of the essence, however, or where electronic access to a research library is lacking, the B.L. system may prove very useful. Check it out at http://direct.bl.uk/.

The ever-expanding empire that is Amazon.com, however, now offers downloadable journal articles as well. The selection is vast, though probably not as vast as the British Library offerings. If you must pay for an article download, however, Amazon is at $5.95 US ($7.50 CDN). As with so much of what makes Amazon.com great, this particular service is not available from Amazon.ca (not that the latter isn't sometimes cheaper, all things considered, if they happen to have the item).