Deidre McCorkindale Team Wins SSHRC Engage Grant

Our own Dr. Deidre McCorkindale is part of a team that has won a SSHRC Engage Grant with partners at Huron University and Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society. Congratulations from all of us!!

From the Press Release 

CKBHS Awarded Research Grant for Innovative Project
The Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society’s Black Mecca Museum and its partners at Huron University and the University of Guelph have been awarded a 2023 research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council to highlight the literary and intellectual history of Chatham’s Black community. The project, “Freedom in Print: Books and Antislavery History at the Chatham-Kent Black Mecca Museum” examines the rich archive of rare books and other print material that was written by Chatham-based Black abolitionists in the 19th century, and that is now part of the special collections at Western University, the University of Guelph, and Oberlin College. 
The project treats antislavery books and other printed works as material artefacts of the nineteenth century's greatest struggle for human freedom. Partnered with faculty and student researchers at Huron University College and the University of Guelph, the Black Mecca Museum will create a database of Chatham-connected abolitionist texts, including information about their provenance, annotations, binding, illustrations, and printing history of particular editions and copies of texts. By reconnecting books with the historical communities and context in which they were written, published, and read, the project will showcase new research about the vibrant history of Chatham's Black activists and their white allies.  
Funding from SSHRC will support summer student research fellowships and a new digital and in-person exhibit highlighting project’s findings. A public launch is planned for October 12 in Chatham, commemorating the 200th birthday of Mary Ann Shadd, who published the Provincial Freeman in Chatham in the 1850s.
Contact: 
Samantha Meredith (Executive Director, CKBHS Black Mecca Museum)
Nina Reid-Maroney (Professor of History, Huron University)