Our Remembrance Day display included a Roll of Honour featuring names submitted by students, faculty and staff from across campus.
Dr. Stanley-Blackwell retired in 2019, and we wanted to share with you a tribute from one of her former students, Bridget Quirk. Her words reflect comments we heard and read from many of Dr. Stanley-Blackwell's former students.
Congratulations to Dr. Barry MacKenzie who defended his thesis with success on Wednesday, August 28.
Dr. Paul Phillips, Professor Emeritus, supervised Dr. MacKenzie's undergrad Honours thesis when he was studying at StFX.
Our Remembrance Day display included a Roll of Honour featuring names submitted by students, faculty and staff from across campus.
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2015 at 7pm. Location: Schwartz 205
The origins of African American History Month in the United States dates back to 1915 when Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in Chicago, Illinois (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History). In 1926 the ASNLH created the first "Negro History Week" and later helped proclaim it a "month" by 1976. Since that time, similar annual commemorations, celebrations, and reflections have spread across the U.S. and around the world. In many contexts, these history recognition events remain significant, but often undervalued as mere token moments for public officials and figures to simply proclaim how far they feel they have achieved "diversity." So why is Black History Month still important? Racism is still a problem in the United States and elsewhere. Dr. Charles and Dr. Rocksborough-Smith will present aspects of their research in light of this question and these debates.
History professors Dr. Laurie Stanley-Blackwell and Dr. Samuel Kalman were among the members of the Faculty of Arts who enjoyed terrific success in the latest rounds of research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Dr. Kalman has received a four-year SSHRCC Insight Grant valued at $49,584 for his project entitled "Law, Order, and Empire: Policing and Criminal Justice in French Algeria, 1871-1962". Dr. Laurie Stanley-Blackwell’s two-year SSHRCC Insight Development Grant is valued at $60,899. In collaboration with her co-applicant, Dr. Michael Linkletter of the Department of Celtic Studies, she will focus on the role of death as a central aspect of the Scottish immigrant experience.
Dr. Richard Isnor, StFX Associate Vice-President Research and Graduate Studies said that StFX had the highest overall success rate of all Maritime universities in the Insight Grant competition, at 43 per cent. The 50 per cent success rate achieved in the Insight Development Grants competition was tied with UPEI as highest among all reporting Alliance of Canadian Comprehensive Research Universities (ACCRU).
“These results demonstrate the high quality of SSHRC grant applications coming from StFX, as well as the strong social science and humanities research capabilities of our faculty,” Dr. Isnor says.
StFX’s Broch Research Collective hosted a second highly successful conference, from June 5-7, 2015, related to gravestone studies.
On Friday evening, the conference launched with an exhibit, “Beneath the Stones,” which featured the art work of Nova Scotian artists Russell Jackson, Anna Syperek, and Bill Rogers. This event was followed by Dr. George Thomson’s public lecture, “Gravemarker Research – A Never-Ending Journey,” which focused extensively on his wide-ranging research into headstone lettering styles.
The Collective’s main event, “Stones, Bones, and Smartphones: Investigating Nova Scotia’s Cemeteries,” was was an all-day workshop attended by academics, school teachers, local genealogists, heritage activists, university students, and cemetery board officials. The presentations, moderated by Ms. Susan Cameron, Dr. Lynda Harling-Stalker, Dr. Michael Linkletter, Dr. Dan MacInnes, and Dr. Laurie Stanley-Blackwell, covered a wide spectrum of topics, demonstrating that the tool box for cemetery research is an eclectic and varied one.
The Broch Research Collective’s second conference highlighted the utility of the cemetery as a research resource for school and university students to learn about local history, art history, population biology, and geology. It also underscored the importance of new technologies for enhancing the research capability of gravestone studies scholars and the potential benefits of bringing together academics, school teachers, students and community members with a shared interest in the past and future of cemeteries.
Dr. Laurie Stanley-Blackwell, chair of the Collective, notes that the participants’ response to the conference was extremely positive.
A new, student-run digital undergraduate journal has debuted at StFX. StFX’s student History Society and the Department of History are proud to announce the publication of the first volume of its open access, digitally accessible undergraduate history journal, The Killick.
Journal articles are written, reviewed, edited and published entirely by 20 student volunteers from departments and programs as varied as history, aquatic resources, education and physics.
“Congratulations to the editor-in-chief, Chris Greencorn, to Rachel Burton, the assistant editor, and to the students from across campus who participated in some way in the writing, editing and/or publishing process,” says Dr. Donna Trembinski, chair of the History Department.
Mr. Greencorn says he was inspired to start The Killick when he discovered the University of Victoria Undergraduate History Society's journal, The Corvette, last spring.
“It started out as something neat to do with the society,” he says. “I had a job to do, and wanted to do it well. But quickly it became something a bit bigger than that.” The journal helps promote the academic culture at StFX, he says.
The journal is freely accessible online at journals.stfx.ca/index.php/killick/issue/view/1.
On Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014, StFX’s Department of History, the Department of Political Science, and the Equity Office, hosted the discussion, “Contextualizing Ferguson: Policing, Race and Culture in Canada and America.”
The discussion was led by Augy Jones, M.Ed., community leader and X-Women basketball head coach, StFX political science professor Dr. Claudia Schaler, an expert in political theory and U.S. politics, and StFX history professor Dr. Robert Zecker, specialist in race and immigration in the U.S.
