Articles by author: mvanatte

  • 2025 Charles A. Sankey Lecture Series!

    Tuesday, February 04, 2025 | By

    The Brock community is invited to the 16th annual Charles A. Sankey Lecture in Masonic Studies on March 30 hosted by the Department of History. . 

    Brock will welcome guest lecturer Dr. Simon Deschamps, Professor at the Centre for Anglophone Studies, Universite Toulouse- Jean Jaures, France. 

    Deschamps will discuss his topic, “Freemasonry and Colonial Power in British India, 1730 -1921”.  

    The free lecture will take place at 3 p.m. in Sean O’Sullivan Theatre with a reception to follow.  Registration is encouraged through www.sankeylectures.ca There will also be a livestream for those who cannot attend in person. 

    The Sankey Lectures series is named in honour of Brock’s second Chancellor and renowned Masonic scholar, R.W. Bro. Charles A. Sankey. It is a collaboration between the University and the Grand Lodge of Canada in the Province of Ontario.  

  • Virtual History MA Information Session- January

    Tuesday, November 19, 2024 | By

    We are pleased to be hosting another virtual History MA information session for students who were not able to attend our fall sessions!

    If you are a 3rd or 4th-year student who in interested in pursuing your Masters, join us on Thursday, January 16th to meet the Graduate Program Director and the Faculty of Graduate Studies as they discuss topics such as, Admission requirements, program options, funding opportunities and more!

    RSVP with the Faculty of Graduate Studies: Graduate Info Sessions – Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs
    or e-mail [email protected].

    MA info – 1

  • History Speaker Series “Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds”

    Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | By

    Join us at our History Speaker Series event “Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds” a book talk by Dr. Diana Cucuz!

    Event Details: 
    Dr. Diana Cucuz, History, Toronto Metropolitan University/Brock University
    When: Thursday, Nov. 14, 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
    Where: Sankey Chamber

    Light refreshments will be served, and a discount code for ordering books will be available

    For more information about Dr. Cucuz and her talk, visit here: History Speaker Series: Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds by Dr. Diana Cucuz – ExperienceBU

    Categories: Brock University Historical Society, Faculty, Graduate, News, Undergraduate

  • History MA Information Session!

    Thursday, October 24, 2024 | By

    If you are a 3rd or 4th year History student who in interested in pursuing your Masters, join us on Monday, October 28th where we are hosting a virtual MA information session to discuss topics such as, Admission requirements, program options, funding opportunities and more!

    RSVP with the Faculty of Graduate Studies: Graduate Info Sessions – Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs

    or e-mail [email protected].

    We look forward to meeting you!

    MA info – 1

  • History Speaker Series Lecture by Don Lafreniere : “Mapping Deeper and Wider: Expanding Public Participatory Spatial Humanities and Social Sciences”

    Tuesday, October 15, 2024 | By

    Department of History Speaker Series Lecture, Fall 2024
    Dr. Don Lafreniere, Geography and GIS, Michigan Technological University

    “Mapping Deeper and Wider: Expanding Public Participatory Spatial Humanities and Social Sciences”

    When: Wed., Oct. 30, 5:30-7 p.m.
    Where: Brock University, Main Campus (Cairns 207)

    Light refreshments will be served

    Co-sponsors: Department of Geography and Tourism Studies; Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald Project

    About the talk: Spatial humanists, geographers, and historians engage with the public in diverse ways, from blogging their research, to producing public-friendly periodicals, to engaging in the art and practice of public history. The Keweenaw Time Traveler project, founded in 2015, employs a public-participatory historical GIS approach to create a deep map to empower a post-industrial community in heritage preservation efforts, reconstructing family histories, geo-heritage, environmental history, and a host of spatial humanities research projects. This talk will outline the project’s latest initiative: the National Endowment for the Humanities Community Deep Mapping Institute, a hybrid virtual and in-person institute running from January through December 2025.

    About the speaker: Dr. Don Lafreniere is Professor of Geography and GIS in the Department of Social Sciences and Director of the Geospatial Research Facility at Michigan Technological University. He uses public-participatory GIS methodologies to recreate historical industrial environments and spatializing populations. He has published extensively on topics such as 19th/20th century social mobility, segregation, migration, and daily lives in industrial cities. His recent work includes creating big-data historical spatial data infrastructure and deep maps for industrial heritage preservation and interpretation for various regions across North America’s Rust Belt. His latest publication, “Built and Social Indicators for Hazards in Children’s Environments,” is published in Health and Place.

    Everyone welcome.

    For more information, e-mail: [email protected].

  • Reimagining the Historic Welland Canals

    Friday, October 04, 2024 | By

    The Centre for Canadian Studies invites you to attend a guest lecture by Kimberly Monk, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Welland Canals.

    This November, the Niagara Region commemorates the start of construction on the First Welland Canal, which through its successice enlargements, has connected trade and navigation between Lakes Ontario and Erie for almost 200 years. The three historic Welland Canals opened in 1829, 1845 and 1881, transforming the region’s physical and cultural landscape, and laying the foundations for the Fourth Welland Canal, in 1931, and modern Niagara.

    Since 2018, a team of Brock academics, students, and community volunteers have been documenting the canal’s industrial legacy through historical and archaeological investigations. However, increasing urban development, the effects of flooding, and a lack of protection and governance, have placed canal heritage at risk. As we begin bicentennial celebrations, prioritizing a strategic partnership to support the Welland Canal Cultural Heritage Landscape is a crucial step towards securing time-sensitive funding for a conservation management plan and tourism strategy. A multi-level, multi-sector collaboration will ensure the historic canals and associated archaeological sites are preserved for future generations.

    Join us at Brock University (RFP 214), Thursday October 24th 
    6:30-8:30pm

    Categories: Brock University Historical Society, Faculty, Lectures/Symposiums, News, Outreach, Undergraduate

  • History Department Open House!

    Friday, October 04, 2024 | By

    The Department of History is hosting an Open House to welcome students into the department to meet Faculty, peers, learn more about program offerings and to enjoy some lunch together.

    Join us on Thursday, October 10th at 12:00 – 2:00 pm. 

    For more information, e-mail: [email protected]

    Categories: Brock University Historical Society, News, Outreach, Undergraduate

  • 2022-2023 History Speaker Series

    Friday, October 21, 2022 | By

    The Department of History is hosting a Speaker Series, featuring Professor Mikko Tolonen from the University of Helsinki.

    This talk aims to envision how the use of machine learning and data-driven approaches can become an everyday practice for historians in the not-too-distant future. Drawing from the lessons learned from a decade of collaborative work at an interdisciplinary Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS), the talk will discuss the group’s research strategy and some of their recent studies of the Enlightenment. COMHIS has worked to harmonize and integrate metadata and full text sources, including the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The talk will introduce the concept of bibliographic data science and use it to examine the representativeness and biases in ECCO. Of the many down-stream use cases, the talk will focus on eighteenth-century reception studies and networks of publishing in the Scottish Enlightenment. The talk will end with a demonstration of the possibilities of using unstructured ECCO data and large language model (BERT) for clustering eighteenth-century subject topics that feeds back to the ESTC metadata creating a virtuous circle in the research use of the available data.

    Mikko Tolonen PhD is Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. His background is in intellectual history, and he is the PI of Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS). His main research focus is on an integrated study of public discourse and knowledge production that combines metadata from library catalogues as well as full-text archives of books, newspapers and periodicals in early modern Europe. Tolonen works also in other areas of Enlightenment studies. Currently he is leading two Academy of Finland projects: Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing (RiCEP); and Detection of Historical Discourses with High-Performance Computing (HPC-HD).

    All are Welcome!