Trent Values the Results of Research

by Michael Peterman

When I first came to Trent University twenty-seven years ago, I knew very little about Peterborough and the Trent Valley region, let alone Canadian literature.

To me, a west Toronto boy with an American university education, Peterborough was cottage country and the home of the Peterborough TPTs (the Petes) who wore Montreal Canadien style uniforms when they played in Sunday afternoon Junior A doubleheaders at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Trent however soon revealed itself to me as many things. Above all, it proved to be a place of academic opportunity. But some of my most important recognitions came slowly.

First of all there was my dissertation to write. That took six years and provided many crucial lessons of self-discipline. Upon its completion, I was far from the state of atrophy that Stephen Leacock attributed to receiving a PhD in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town--The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and is pronounced completely full. After this, no new ideas can be imparted to him.

In fact, I was just beginning to look closely into the literary life of the Peterborough area, an investigation that heated up during my first sabbatical in 1978-79.

What is a sabbatical? Paid university leaves may seem a frivolous exercise to some hard-working citizens. They are, however, the lynchpin of academic research; they provide the precious block of time needed to work in an unimpeded way on a project.

At a university like Trent, where teaching is so important a part of the mandate, RESEARCH time is available only in the summer months and during a sabbatical year.

The system works this way. For each year of teaching, a faculty member earns a credit. A certain number accumulated allows the professor to apply for leave, but one must then present a coherent plan of research to a committee chaired by the Dean. When the year is over, one must make a full report to the same committee. Universities guard carefully against abuses of the system, precisely because the costs of such opportunities are high and an institutions reputation rests in part upon what its faculty can achieve as researchers. According to the annual Macleans rankings, Trent has a very productive faculty, tops among Canadas small universities in research grant competitions. Such results are clearly linked to productive sabbatical efforts.

A sabbatical thus comes with its own pressures. One is expected to produce. It is in the nature of things that the production--the collection of data, the thinking through of related problems, and the writing--takes a lot of time, but such work has been for me an exciting and sustaining process.

Part of my plan for my first sabbatical was to prepare a bibliography of all of the writings by and about Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.

It proved, as many such projects initially do, challenging; but, as there is nothing like learning on the job, I was not long in realizing first how difficult the project was and secondly how much interesting material about Moodie and Traill was waiting to be tapped and interpreted.

Much of my research time over the past twenty years has been devoted to Traill and Moodie. In this pursuit I was fortunate to be in tune with larger initiatives of a national dimension. Attention to writing and culture in Canada was on the rise by the early 1970s.

Those interested in nineteenth-century writing were eager to know more about the notable practitioners, the books they wrote, the conditions under which they were published, and the lives they led. For scholars with such projects, there was research money available, even if many of the old guard in the literary establishment still looked askance at Canadian projects. Hence, it was a very good time to undertake fresh research into early Canadian writing.

The work in which I have been involved on Moodie and Traill- -collections of their letters, editions of their books, studies of their literary efforts, the aforementioned bibliography, and most recently a biography of Moodie--as well as on Robertson Davies, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Scott Young, has been a joy to undertake. It has involved generous funding support from Trent University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Reseach Council, collaboration with scholars across Canada and abroad, close contacts with members of Peterboroughs talented local- history community, and, above all, the exciting opportunity to dig deep (deeper than seemed possible back in 1979) into the Canadian and local literary past, recovering a fuller sense of what this country was, and is, all about.

Trent University gave me that opportunity and the Peterborough community has provided, and continues to provide, much valued support.

Michael Peterman, Department of English Literature, Trent University


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