Trent Historians Make Presence Felt at Canadian Historical Association Meeting
Trent University historians featured prominently at the 93rd annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), the largest annual gathering of historians in Canada, held during the 2014 Congress of Humanities and Social Science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario from May 26 to 28, 2014.
Dr. Joan Sangster, professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and director of the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, was elected vice-president of the association for 2014-2015. Professor Sangster’s election means that she will become president of the CHA from 2015-2017, and is the first Trent historian to hold this prestigious post as the leading advocate for all historians in Canada. W. L. Morton, a former principal of Champlain College, held the position in 1959-60, before he came to Trent.
At the CHA awards ceremony, Professor Dimitry Anastakis, chair of Canadian Studies at Trent, was awarded the Political History Group prize for the best book in political history for his book, Autonomous State: The Struggle for a Canadian Car Industry from OPEC to Free Trade. The book had previously been awarded the 2014 Hagley Prize in Business History by the Business History Conference, and was also shortlisted for the Canada Prize in the Humanities, awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Professor Bryan Palmer, Tier I Canada Research Chair in Canadian Studies at Trent, was also celebrated at an event for his editorship of the journal Labour/Le Travail, a post from which he is stepping down after seventeen years. Prof. Palmer also gave an opening plenary address at the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies.
Other Trent historians who presented papers or facilitated sessions included Professors Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, Christopher Dummitt, and Drs. Alison Norman and David Tough, both SSHRC postdoctoral fellows at Trent in the Frost Centre and the Department of Canadian Studies. Dr. Heather Shpuniarsky, a recent graduate of the Department of Indigenous Studies, also presented a paper, while Professor Caroline Durand was also elected for a three-year term as the French Secretary of the Canadian Committee on Women’s History.