History: Colonial Science and Residential Schools: Ian Mosby Talk Sept. 25
On September 25, as part of the University of Guelph interdisciplinary talk series The Ethics and Politics of Food, Dr. Ian Mosby will discuss his recent research on mid-20th century government nutritional studies in First Nations communities. Dr. Mosby's findings have recently been in the news and raised a public discussion about the ethics of government-funded scientific activity in those years. The talk takes place in MacKinnon 304 from 12:00 - 1:30. Light lunch provided. All welcome! Get the flyer: .pdf
In 1911, Irish dentist Shenstone Bishop petitioned for divorce from his wife, Ethel. He cited adultery – or, as he had stated in a petition filed two years earlier, his wife’s “doings with a gentleman.” When the jury failed to agree on a verdict, the Bishops wrote a deed of separation. Ethel then took rooms in several venues: Dublin’s Imperial Hotel, the North British Hotel in Glasgow and a Belfast railway hotel. In each place, staff members saw her accompanied by a man named Harry Raphael. Indeed, the guest book at the Belfast hotel recorded them as husband and wife – even as Mr. and Mrs. Bishop. Far from trying to keep the affair quiet, they had intended to be seen. They were hardly the first lovers to have selected grand hotels for a not-so-clandestine tryst, says U of G history professor Kevin James.
Ian Mosby, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of History, continues to make headlines with his research that shows hungry aboriginal children and adults were used in nutritional experiments by Canadian government bureaucrats between 1942 and 1952. In addition to generating news reports around the country, the research has prompted calls for action. CBC published a 
Ian Mosby, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History, is featured today in a news report by the Canadian Press, which appears in the 
Wade Cormack, a recent U of G graduate, has been making international headlines recently. He was recently entrusted with the task of documenting the origins of golf in Scotland as part of a unique, three-year doctoral research position. Golf is a pillar of Scottish identity and one of the country's most distinctive contributions to global culture. News articles about his project have appeared in the 
Dr. Matthew Hayday's research into the origins, politics and meaning of Canada's national symbols and celebrations is mentioned in a recent National Post article by Allen Levine. Read the story at the 
Growing up in the cheek-by-jowl townhouses of Keele and Finch in the 1970s, Dr. Jason Wilson couldn’t accept that his Scottish-Canadian pastiness was a bad fit with his Jamaican neighbours’ music. In a city where the gifts of ethnicity are there for the taking, the budding keyboardist ignored the funny looks and grew up to be a Juno-nominated reggae artist. So when this genre-bending 43-year-old took the stage at Hugh’s Room recently and made the Great War his theme, he naturally went looking for the laughs. Stereotypes about what’s appropriate just don’t seem to apply. “People say I’m fearless,” he says, with a strong strain of self-denial. “But that’s not it. I just don’t consider the idea that I’m offending anyone.” If you want to know about the key role played by female impersonators on the front lines, Mr. Wilson’s your man. As the centenary of the First World War approaches, he has devised a tribute show to weird wartime comedy troupes that were the forerunners of modern satire. Or, as Mr. Wilson puts it in his accompanying book, The Soldiers of Song, “The seeds of black humour that inspired the likes of Monty Python, Saturday Night Live and SCTV were sown in the trenches of the Great War.”
In a feature article in Montreal's Le Devoir, PhD student Marc-André Gagnon talks about la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste, also known as the Fête Nationale. The event is celebrated on June 24 thoughout French Canada, with particularly large celebrations in the province of Quebec, and has become the national holiday for French-speaking Canadians. Gagnon discusses the origins and evolution of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, and the various forms of meaning people have ascribed to a holiday that currently has strong overtones of separatism in Quebec, but which has always been politicized as a day of affirmation of French-Canadian culture.