Congratulations to four Brock MA candidates in History who received 2026 Ontario Graduate Scholarships! The OGS is a competitive, merit-based scholarship awarded to those demonstrating academic excellence. This is a well-deserved honour, reflecting the tremendous potential of these students’ four original research projects. Very well done, all!
Emma Craib studies Holocaust testimonies collected by Miriam Novitch (1908-1990). Novitch was a resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, testimony and document collector, and Israeli Holocaust historian. The testimonies studied in this project were collected in France from 1944 to 1946 while Novitch was in Vittel camp and Bourboule displaced persons camp. This project offers significant insights into questions of gender and women’s experiences during and after the Holocaust.
Ethan Moncion focuses on the food history of a little-known colonial military unit called the Provincial Marine that served to both protect and provision Canada in the early British colonial era. In the War of 1812, they functioned primarily as a transport service for the military. This project explores what they were eating themselves, what they provided to the army, and how this contributes to our understanding of how people have historically fed themselves in the context of wars of attrition.
Ivan Rimac focuses on Yugolav general Arso Jovanović and the Tito-Stalin split (1948). The project’s key intervention is to present Jovanović as an active agent who shaped unfolding events in postwar Yugoslavia and, in particular, served as a military counterweight to Tito’s ideo-political legitimacy, rather than as a passive victim. It utilizes microhistorical methodologies to examine how civil-military relations functioned through a single individual actor. In doing so, it analyzes subsequent state-directed historiography that erased Jovanović alongside his lasting contested legacy as a “Cominformist victim.”
Kyle Timmins explores how intersections of identity, class, and gender shaped the experiences of volunteer militia officers between 1835 and 1885. The Canadian Militia refers to pre-1940 semi-professional defence forces in British North America. Born out of the War of 1812, the militia became an important part of life in Upper Canada. Much like the modern reserves, service was voluntary and often part-time. This project explores the role of the Canadian Militia as a social institution and particularly how volunteer service corresponded with dominant Victorian ideals of masculinity and duty.