Research

Our Contribution To The Historical Discipline

Sustained research and scholarly publication are the cornerstones of the Department of History at Dalhousie University. Our faculty are counted among Canada's leading research scholars, and it is this well-acknowledged research profile that has made our department an attractive destination for advanced graduate students and junior research scholars.  We have in recent years successfully attracted Killam and SSHRC postdoctoral fellows to our department, while our rich research profile has also helped recruit some of Canada's leading young historians to Halifax.

Research in the historical discipline can be rich and varied, and Dalhousie history professors are especially active in terms of contribution: (re)discovery of new historical sources, editing and publishing of manuscript materials, re-evaluating and critiquing existing historical paradigms, introducing new methodologies and approaches to types of historical sources (literary, artistic, cultural, economic, demographic, etc.), as well as crafting new interpretations which realign, or even challenge, existing scholarly discourses and practices.

Our faculty has been singularly exceptional in recent years with respect to landing major external research grants as well as fellowships to conduct research at other institutions, libraries, and archives. Moreover, our professors are invited regularly to present their ongoing research and findings to international audiences in workshops, conferences, and seminars across Asia, Africa, and Europe. As a result, Dalhousie's History Department stands as the leading, research-based academic unit for historical studies in Atlantic Canada.

 

Select Publications from our Faculty

 

Death Control in the West 1500-1800

Gregory Hanlon

Marriage, Separation and Divorce in England, 1500-1700

Krista Kesselring

The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada: Development Programs and Democracy

Will Langford

"Dis(playing) Politics: Craft and the Caughnawaga Exhibition, 1883" in Craft is Political

Lisa Binkley

The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past

Denis Kozlov

"Old Methods Not Up to New Ways: The Strategic Use of Advertising in the Fight for Pure Food After 1906" in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 

Alana Toulin

Churchill and the Dardanelles

Christopher Bell 

Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of British North America, 1749-1876

Jerry Bannister

"Custodial Politics and Princely Governance in Sixteenth-Century Safavid Iran" in The Safavid World

Colin Mitchell

"An Ether by Any Other Name? Paul Dirac's Æther" in Revisiting the Aether in Science

Aaron Wright

Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms

Jolanta Pekacz

"Contemporary Africans Meet Timeless Africa: The Conflicted Impact of Asadata Dafora’s “African Operas” on Pan-African Work in the United States, 1930–50 in The Journal of West African History


Philip Zachernuk

Sovereignty Beyond Eurocentricity

Ajay Parasram

Township Violence and the End of Apartheid:  War on the Reef  

Gary Kynoch

Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic:  1750-1807

Justin Roberts

Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver

Todd McCallum

Enemy Alien: A True Story of Life Behind Barbed Wire

Kassandra Luciuk

"A New Biography of the African Diaspora: The Odyssey of Marie-Joseph Angelique, Black Portuguese Slave Womanin New France, 1725-1734" in Sisters or Strangers?



Afua Cooper