More Graduate Student Success

Ph.D. student Camie Augustus will be leaving us for a year to take up a prestigious "Pre-doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Award in American Indian Studies" at Michigan State University. Camie is working on "Indigenous Mixed Blood Identities: A Comparative Approach (Canada, US, Mexico and Australia)" (supervisors: Jim Miller and Jim Handy).

Congratulations, Camie! We wish you the best of luck at MSU.

Spurred to Success

Dave Smith, a doctoral student supervised by Gary Zellar and Keith Carlson, has received two prestigious awards this past year. Last June, his article "Owen Wister's Paladin of the Plains: The Virginian as a Cultural Hero," won the Western Writers of America "Spur Award" for Best Western Short Nonfiction. The article was originally published in the peer-reviewed journal South Dakota History. (See above, picture 1: Dave in appropriate western attire, holding the Spurs.)

Dave continues to ride high. Last week, Dave was in St. Louis where he received the Popular Culture/American Culture association's William M. Jones Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in American Culture for his essay, "American Nightmare: Images of Brainwashing, Thought Control and Terror in Soviet Russia." The essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of the society's journal. (See above, picture 2: Dave receiving the award from Dr. Kathy M Jackson.)

The second article comes from his M.A. thesis, but his first article comes from his doctoral dissertation, which is in progress. He is researching the use of western rhetoric and images by American presidents.

More Medical History

On March 12 and 13, seven of our students participated in the Annual History of Medicine Days at the University of Calgary. Five students presented papers and one presented a research poster. The conference was well-attended, with over 30 papers and 20 posters. Our students earned 3 prizes.

Heather Stanley: second runner-up, audio-visual category.
Mat Mossey: first runner-up, Bill Whitelaw Award in Internal Medicine.
Adam Fowler (alumnus and current medical student): first runner-up, overall category.

Other department participants included: Leslie Baker, Lucas Richert and Amy Samson. Congratulations to all of the students on such a fine departmental showing!

Congratulations to Rob Konkel

Fourth-year Honours History student Rob Konkel has won a highly-competitive AMS Hannah Summer Studentship to undertake a summer project. In addition to working with Dr. Lisa Smith on an online database, "Eighteenth-Century Medical Collection Letters Online" (to be made public in June), Rob will write a long research essay considering the ways in which scientific men established medical authority in the physician-patient relationship in early modern England. He will extensively use the U of S library's microfilm collection of Sir Hans Sloane's scientific and medical correspondence. This will be a great introduction to the nuts and bolts of managing and undertaking a large historical research project for Rob -- just in time for him to start an MPhil programme at Oxford in the autumn!