Thinking about graduate study in History? Attend our informational session to find out about Brock’s Master of Arts program in History. Join us virtually on Thursday, September 25, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.
Find us on ExperienceBU here.
Alexandra Macdonald, a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department, is collaborating with St. Catharines heritage site The Brown Homestead to grow and process flax and transform it into linen using techniques developed in the eighteenth century. The partnership will provide an exciting opportunity for community members to take part in the process on Saturday, October 4, as part of Ontario Culture Days 2025.
Photo: Macdonald (left) and Jessica Linzel (History BA 2018, MA 2021), The Brown Homestead director of research and collections (Brock News)
Read the full story: Historical textile research cultivates connection to the past
For event details: History postdoc Alexandra Macdonald to host flax demonstration on Oct. 4
Join History Department postdoctoral fellow Alexandra Macdonald for a very special hands-on demonstration at The Brown Homestead. Dr. Macdonald will show participants how to work with flax using processes related to her research and developed in the eighteenth century.
This drop-in event, part of Ontario Culture Days 2025, is on Saturday, October 4, 2025, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Brown Homestead is located at 1317 Pelham Road in St. Catharines. It is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!
Learn more about Dr. Macdonalds’ work here.
Planning to major (or minor) in History? Thinking about it? Or just interested in learning more?
Join us to talk with faculty and current students about our 1st-year course offerings, our degree programs (including the History/Concurrent Education BA and the History Co-op program), and more! And enjoy a slice of pizza, too.
We’re excited to meet you! All are welcome.
Check us out on ExperienceBU here.
Brock History Department faculty members Jessica Clark, Olatunji Ojo, and Tami J. Friedman (behind the camera) were on hand to greet students in the Faculty of Humanities at Smart Start, July 31, 2025. They distributed informational materials and swag and had great conversations with enthusiastic majors and prospective majors.
History alumnus Jared Shawcross (BA 2020, MA 2021), acting heritage interpretation officer with Parks Canada, recently appeared on Breakfast Television to give a hands-on introduction to HMCS Haida, a destroyer used during World War II and the Korean War. The ship is now a national historic site stationed in Hamilton (Ont.) Harbour.
(Jared appears at about 4:56, but it’s worth watching the whole thing.)
This news comes to us from History alumna (and Jared’s partner) Katherine Foran (BA 2019, MA 2021), who reports that Jared successfully “built connections through his Co-op placements that brought him to the career he has today.” Katherine is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Guelph.
Well done, Jared!
For more information about visiting the ship site: https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/on/haida
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 welcome
More about Mikko Tolonen:
Mikko Tononen, 375 Humanists, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki
https://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/en/humanists/mikko-tolonen
Mikko Tolonen, Publications
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/mikko-tolonen
Helsinki Computational History Group, Computational History, University of Helsinki
https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/computational-history
HPC-HD High Performance Computing for the Detection and Analysis of Historical Discourses
https://hpc-hd.github.io/
“Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing” (RICEP), 2020-2024
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/c18-publishing/
“Teaching Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki,” Council for European Studies (CES), Europe Now, Campus Dispatches, September 10, 2019 https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/09/09/teaching-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-helsinki/