Hans Beck’s path-breaking work has led to major innovations in the study of ancient Greek and Roman political culture. Beyond the Mediterranean World, he is an active agent in the development of international research networks in comparative history, including comparisons with ancient China. His prolific output informs contemporary debates about local and global paradigms, the relationship between ethnicity and federalism, and the modes of economic cooperation in federal systems.

Prof. Heaman has won the Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research: The Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for her book Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). Using extensive archival research from private papers, commissions, the press, and the government, Prof. Heaman shows that the Constitutional Act of 1867 was about the need for Canadians to write a new tax deal that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations.

Professor James Krapfl will spend six months in the academic year 2018-19 as a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. He will be working on his project “The Other 1968: A Cultural History of East Central Europe in the Prague Spring Era,” which compares mentalities and patterns of political engagement in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland at the grassroots level in the late 1960s.  Affiliated with the Friedrich Schiller University, the Kolleg is an institute for advanced study focusing on twentieth-century east central and southeastern Europe. 

Congratulations

In his new book MAD FLIGHT? The Quebec Emigration to the Coffee Plantations of Brazil (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Professor John Zucchi reconstructs the 1896 rush of one thousand Quebeckers to find riches on the coffee plantations in Santos (Brazil), and how this adventure ended for many in poverty, tragedy, and even death. Most survivors returned penniless to Canada. The Mad Flight was widely reported in newspapers at the time, but is completely forgotten today.

Professor Elsbeth Heaman was promoted to full professor in early 2018. Originally from British Columbia, she earned her B.A. and M.A. in our department and then went to the University of Toronto for her Ph.D. Early in her career, she published two books on exhibitions in Canadian society in the 19th century and on St. Mary's hospital, London's great teaching hospital and pre-eminent site for medical education in England. In 2015 and 2017, two books on state formation, political economy, and social history in Canada followed.

Professor Allan Greer’s new book Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2018. In the book, he examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England.