Articles by author: tfriedman

  • History faculty garner significant federal research funding

    Wednesday, August 05, 2026 | By

    We are delighted to announce that several History Department faculty members have received generous support through the Canadian government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

    Dr. Behnaz Mirzai has received a SSHRC Connection Grant in the amount of $45,336, covering the period 2026-2027, for her project, “Entangled Histories: Slavery and Its Legacies in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern Worlds.”

    Dr. Colin Rose has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant (Stream A) in the amount of $115,096, coverinig the period 2025-2031, for his project, “Mapping Crime and Conflict in Early Modern Italy.”

    Project description: “The grant will support a research program around justice, conflict resolution and civil society as ideas and as practices in early modern Florence and Bologna. These cities represent two different forms of judicial governance and social organization. In each, individuals and communities practiced conflict, negotiation and peacemaking in their own socioeconomic, institutional, and spatial contexts. How did differing political forms shape local conflict resolution practices? How did local understandings of space and place manifest in justice-seeking processes? Investigating the social practices of ordinary and elite conflict resolution in this thickly-archived region will advance our understanding of how communities in the past negotiated a variety of problems and challenges. By doing so, I aim to help people understand modern social conflict through lenses of social trust, civil society and justice.”

    Dr. Mark Spencer and his co-applicant Dr. Marc Hanvelt (Carleton University) are recipients of a SSHRC Insight Grant (Stream B) in the amount of $315,365, covering the period 2025-2031, for their project, “David Hume’s History of England: The Critical Edition and New Methods of Historical Editing.”

    Project description: “David Hume (1711-1776) is widely regarded as one of the leading European philosophers, political thinkers, and historians of the eighteenth century. And yet, there exists no critical edition of his capstone work, The History of England. This SSHRC Insight Grant will support our work to produce one, contracted with Oxford University Press for inclusion in their Clarendon Hume Edition Series. Together with our collaborator (Mikko Tolonen, University of Helsinki), we are developing a new approach to editing a critical edition that blends traditional methods of historical research and text editing with digital tools and techniques that were unavailable to earlier generations of scholars.”

    Congratulations, all!

    Categories: News

  • Ace Gammon-Burnett to defend History MA thesis: August 24, 2026

    Wednesday, August 05, 2026 | By

    History MA candidate Ace Gammon-Burnett will defend his thesis on Monday, August 24, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

    The defence will take place on Teams. Interested members of the public are welcome to attend.

    Ace’s thesis is entitled, “Opposita juxta: Aristotelian Antithesis as the Epistemic Engine of Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia: or, A View of All Religions in the World (1653/1655).” His thesis supervisor is Dr. Michael Driedger.

    Thesis abstract

    Alexander Ross (1591–1654), Royalist cleric and controversialist, confronted the collapse of sociopolitical and religious conformity during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum—and the exposure of early modern Europeans to global religious diversity—by doubling down on an aggressively ancient Aristotelian mode of knowing. This thesis foregrounds Ross’s use of antithesis as a core epistemological structure for defining “true religion” through the curated “deformities” of its many contraries in his best-selling Pansebeia (1653/1655). I also trace Ross’s theory of heliolatry (sun-worship) as the origin of “Gentile” religion, linking his anxieties over contemporary heliocentric innovations across key texts of his corpus to his conclusions in Pansebeia. Building primarily on R.J.W. Mills’s work on the conflicting legacy of Pansebeia as both heresiographical polemic and an inadvertent precursor to Enlightenment notions of religious diversity, my close-reading analysis across three chapters reconstructs Ross’s comparative method to show how his rigid Aristotelian framework shaped the aims, limits, and paradoxical consequences of Pansebeia.

    Categories: Events

  • Lauren Berry to defend History MA thesis: August 17, 2026

    Wednesday, August 05, 2026 | By

    The History Deparatment is pleased to announce that MA candidate Lauren Berry will defend her thesis on Monday, August 17, from 10 a.m. to 12 noon.

    The defence will take place both in person, in Room 600F of the Plaza building on the Brock University campus, and on Teams. It is open to interested members of the public.

    Lauren’s thesis is entitled, “Panic and Popularity: English Women Actors and their Detractors, 1730-1810.” Her thesis supervisor is Dr. Jessica Clark.

    Thesis abstract

    In eighteenth-century England, claims circulated about the alleged licentiousness and immorality of both the theatre and actresses, fueling anxieties that dominated eighteenth-century English culture. This created challenges not only for the theatre, but also actresses as cultural creators; these included but were not limited to actresses not being taken seriously, stigma around their work, a nebulous social position for the group, and the emergence of a mode of celebrity that, while a positive development in some ways, also generated gossip, rumours, and scurrilous stories in the English press and popular culture.

    This thesis argues that, in spite of these challenges, pro-theatricalists and actresses responded to detractors by asserting their role as cultural creators through their own writings, thus reclaiming a space among an emotional community of supporters who were key contributors to English cultural productions. It does so via both quantitative and qualitative historical methods.

    For the former, this thesis surveys recurring language and arguments in twenty-six tracts from authors of various religious denominations and three tracts by secular authors. These incudes arguments made against the theatre in pamphlets, books, and sermons such as the anonymously written The Stage the High Road to Hell (1767) and Remarks on the Prevailing Custom of Attending Stage Entertainments (1794) by John Kendall.

    For the latter, I undertake deep, contextual readings of print culture produced by both detractors of the theatre and cultural creators defending its significance—that is novels, plays, and autobiographies written by actresses such as Charlotte Charke and Mary Robinson—as well as pamphlets and responses created by pro-theatricalists and reformers. I also consult literature, conduct or advice manuals, encyclopedias, pamphlets, tracts, and sermons.

    In doing so, this thesis demonstrates that eighteenth-century English actresses were cultural creators in their own right, who led the way in defending the theatre both explicitly and implicitly through their artistic works.

    Categories: Events

  • Join the History Department at Humanities Smart Start: July 23, 2026

    Monday, July 20, 2026 | By

    (Above: Brock History Department faculty members Jessica Clark, Olatunji Ojo, and Tami J. Friedman [behind the camera] were on hand to greet Humanities students at Smart Start, July 31, 2025.)

    Are you starting school at Brock this fall? Connect with Department of History faculty members at Smart Start (Faculty of Humanities) on July 23. We’ll be staffing a table in Rankin Family Pavilion from 9-10 a.m. and again from 1-2 p.m.

    Don’t miss the Department’s own Dr. Jessica Clark at the Humanities panel, “The One Thing You Should Know: Tips for Humanities Students.” She’ll be speaking about communicating with your instructors. The panel will be held in Sean O’Sullivan Theatre from 10:30-11:30 a.m.

    Be sure to stop by! We’re excited to meet you.

    For the day’s schedule, click here: https://discover.brocku.ca/start/schedule/#july-23

    Categories: Events

  • Trudy Tattersall to defend Humanities doctoral thesis: July 14, 2026

    Wednesday, July 08, 2026 | By

    The Brock Department of History is pleased to announce that Trudy Tattersall, will defend her Ph.D. dissertation in Interdisciplinary Humanities on Tuesday, July 14.

    The defence will be held in Room 600F of the Plaza building on the Brock University campus from 12 noon to 3 p.m. Interested members of the public are welcome to attend.

    Trudy is a long-time teaching assistant and part-time instructor in the History Department. Her Ph.D. supervisor is Dr. Daniel Samson, a faculty member in the Department

    The thesis is entitled, “A Mingled Yarn”: Needlework, Emotional Communities, and Affective Experience in Settler-Colonial Maritime Canada.”

    Dissertation abstract

    This dissertation examines 18th- and 19th-century needlework – particularly schoolgirl samplers – as material and affective practices through which women’s emotional lives, identities, and social values were shaped in settler-colonial societies. Focusing on Maritime Canada, it places samplers and other forms of needlework in dialogue with women’s diaries, letters, school advertisements, and prescriptive educational literature to explore how emotion, discipline, and belonging were produced through tactile, bodily engagement with and reflection on material objects.

    The dissertation intervenes in a field dominated by British and New England scholarship that tends to frame samplers primarily as decorative, genealogical, or completed pedagogical texts. It reframes needlework as emotional practice, material literacy, and historical evidence. It approach needlework as a proprioceptive and embodied knowledge practice that required intimate encounters between body, tool, and textile.

    The study brings together feminist material culture theory, gender history, affect theory, and the history of emotions, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Barbara Rosenwein, Sara Ahmed, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Iris Marion Young to demonstrate that needlework functioned as a form of emotional governance.  Across its chapters, the thesis analyzes samplers as pedagogical exercises, visual and textual compositions, sensory objects, and intergenerational heirlooms. It demonstrates how the embodied act of stitching and the material qualities of textiles shaped emotional regulation, self-understanding, and community affiliation. The final chapter considers the preservation of samplers as family heirlooms and museum artefacts, arguing that female preservation practices constituted vital cultural and affective labor shaping family memory and institutional collections.

    Needlework produced shared ways of feeling and behaving that marked girls as properly socialized members of settler communities, linking emotional discipline and technical skill to respectability, legitimacy, and identity. By treating needlework as both historical evidence and emotional practice, this thesis challenges the idea that the domestic sphere was insignificant or apolitical. It demonstrates that everyday forms of making and preserving textiles played an important role in shaping women’s lives and sustaining colonial social values, and it places women’s material and emotional experiences at the center of the history of early Atlantic Canada. It reveals that the emotional worlds of girls and women, so often dismissed as private or apolitical, were in fact deeply constitutive of the social, moral, and ideological fabric of early Maritime Canada.

    Categories: Events

  • Renée Girard wins prestigious history journal prize

    Wednesday, July 08, 2026 | By

    The Brock Department of History is delighted to congratulate Dr. Renée Girard for receiving the Canadian Historical Review Best Article Prize for 2025.

    The prize is awarded annually to the author of the article appearing in the CHR who “best demonstrates the finest qualities of advanced historical scholarship: an original and compelling argument that engages and contributes to the historiography, deep research and analysis usually engaging with primary sources, and well-crafted writing.”

    The article, entitled “Un mode par excellence de resurrection des noyés: la fumée du tabac et la persistence des pratiques autochtones dans la France du XVIIIe siècle,” appears in the December 2025 issue of the CHR (vol. 106, no. 4).

    Dr. Girard holds adjunct faculty status in the History Department. She earned her MA in the Department and her Ph.D. at McGill University and has taught several history courses at Brock. Kudos for this well deserved honour!

    From the journal’s editorial board: “In 1748 a physician wrote a pamphlet promoting tobacco enemas as a new way to revive people who had drowned or suffocated and by the mid-nineteenth century it had become a widely accepted method. In this intriguing and surprising article, Girard traces the origins of this medical practice to North American Indigenous ceremonial and diplomatic uses of tobacco. This article is an original and innovative examination of the intersections between western European medicine and Indigenous knowledge. Introduced to Europe by soldiers, the popular use of tobacco enemas demonstrates European fascination with the plant’s supposedly mysterious properties. Cartesian medicine, based in experimentation, distanced medical theories about tobacco’s ability to reanimate from its Indigenous origins, and similarly, historians looking to understand the medicinal use of tobacco through European sources have also erased the connections to Indigenous spiritual and medical practices. Girard’s research demonstrates the complexity of the circulation of knowledge systems in the Atlantic World and the integration of Indigenous epistemologies into European medicine” (CHR vol. 107, no. 2 [June 2026]).

    Categories: News

  • Owen McAllister to defend History MA thesis: July 9, 2026

    Wednesday, July 08, 2026 | By

    History MA candidate Owen McAllister will defend his thesis on Thursday, July 9, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

    The defence will take place both in person, in Room 601C of the Plaza building on the Brock University campus, and on Teams. Interested members of the public are welcome to attend.

    Owen’s thesis is entitled, “A War of Words: Jacobitism as a Language of Dissent in England during the Reign of William III, 1688-1702.”

    Thesis abstract
    This thesis explores how Jacobitism became a significant framework for those opposed to the political settlement following the Glorious Revolution and how this movement functioned as a language of dissent utilized by those opposed to the new Williamite regime. In doing so, this thesis challenges the Whiggish historical narrative that William III’s Glorious Revolution enjoyed overwhelming popular support, was bloodless, and that the Jacobite movement had little support in England.

    The thesis explores this topic through deep biographical case studies to highlight the material and interpersonal interconnectedness of those involved in the Jacobite print trade: authors, printers, distributors, verbal supporters, and those who took part in censoring the movement. This thesis reveals a network of Jacobite supporters active in London who wrote and printed Jacobite works, as well as those who demonstrated support by distributing them or through verbal expressions. The censorship apparatus of the Williamite regime also features prominently, revealing connections between informers, spies, messengers of the press, common people who took the suppression of the Jacobite movement upon themselves, and the supporters of the Jacobite movement who they suppressed or attempted to suppress.

    In doing so, the thesis explores how the state weaponized sectarianism and the legal system to stabilize its rule and maintain its grip on power during the years of instability in William III’s reign.  England, unlike Scotland and Ireland, had no popular revolt against William’s rule; rather, this thesis highlights a war of words raging in England following the Glorious Revolution.

    Categories: Events

  • Proud History grads walk the stage in June 2026

    Monday, June 29, 2026 | By

    Heartfelt congratulations to all the Brock History students who earned their undergraduate degrees in June 2026. We are so proud of your accomplishments and excited for you as you embark on the next stage in your journeys. It is an honour to have been part of the process. Best wishes to you all!

    Just a few of our graduates appear in the photo above, from left to right: Joey Sanders, Erin Miller, Olivia Hall, and Jack Evans with Dr. Andrew McDonald (second from left). All received their History BAs and B.Eds.

    Categories: News

  • Students share insights gleaned from study-abroad trip to Florence

    Saturday, June 27, 2026 | By

    Read the full story here: https://brocku.ca/brock-news/2026/06/brock-students-step-into-the-world-of-renaissance-florence/

    Read more about students’ expectations as they prepared for the trip here: https://brocku.ca/humanities/history/2026/05/16/students-head-to-florence-to-discover-history-first-hand/

    Categories: News

  • Students head to Florence to discover history first-hand

    Saturday, May 16, 2026 | By

    The History Department’s Colin Rose is shepherding a group of students around Florence, Italy, in a new course introducing them first-hand to the social history of the Renaissance.

    The course, MARS/HIST 3F52, is housed in the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and cross-listed by the History Department. Before heading overseas, the students met daily with Dr. Rose to immerse themselves in the city’s past and work with primary sources from the period. Once in Italy, they will learn more about the social, political, and cultural history of Florence and the daily lives of its inhabitants, while also visiting important cultural sites as well as Siena and Bologna.

    Students embarking on the trip bring diverse interests and perspectives to the course. Nick Kester, a History major finishing his fourth year of study, says, “I have wanted to visit Florence since I was 12 years old playing video games set in that city and am so excited to see it with my own eyes.” This won’t be his first hands-on experience: “The History Department and Brock have provided me with several opportunities for experiential learning,” he adds, “and every single one of them have been incredible chances to expand my knowledge base far beyond the classroom.”

    Another enthusiastic participant, Harry Mavromichalis, has just completed his first year as a MARS and Classics & Archaeology major. He points out, “The course presents a really unique opportunity to bring my studies to life and experience the culture and history and see how it has affected modern Italy.”

    Brooke Nolan, a Concurrent Education student majoring in Visual Arts and completing her fourth year at Brock, shares her classmates’ excitement. “I’ve been really interested in the Renaissance since I took a Renaissance art history class, and it focused a lot on Florence,” she reports. “I was really inspired by a lot of the art and how influential it was for its time. I’m excited to see it in person, especially the Ufizzi Gallery and other art institutions, and the architecture as well.”

    Learn more about the Ufizzi Gallery’s holdings here.

    Buon viaggio! We wish you marvelous adventures and lots of learning along the way.

    Categories: News

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