9:30 - 10:45 a.m. - Room A
Feelings and Sensations
Angel Azzuolo
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Observing Olfaction: A Conversation on Sense as Methodology inspired by Comm(o)nsality.
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The formal constraints of written analysis necessarily constrict the depth of said analysis to one sense alone. That restriction, particularly when it comes to studying food, risks flattening the focus of study. The following exercise hopes to encourage a conversation about the sensory aspect of food. Focused on scent, it explores the remarkable, often visceral, way in which this sense functions in memory making.
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Angel Azzuolo is pursuing a Master of Arts in History at Concordia University. Her interests lie in the power of food memorialization, and the intersections of eating and identity. She previously worked as a professional cook in both Montreal and France, and her current research is inspired by her experiences in the restaurant industry.
Mara Rodríguez
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Sonorous Mexico: Street Vendors and Sound Recording Technology in Mexico City’s Auditory Space (1880-1915)
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The urban landscape in Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century was a bustling space with enormous movement, between the people who traveled by foot and the vendors who came and went displaying their merchandise. This territory is an ideal place to approach the Capitalino population’s reaction to the arrival of the newly created talking machine to Mexico. This paper explores Emily Thompson and Jonathan Sterne’s conceptualization of aural modernity and ensoniment. By analyzing various cases, I will examine how the emerging sound recording technologies were negotiated by the street vendors in the auditory space.
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Mara Rodriguez holds a BA in History from the UAM in Mexico City. She is currently a Masters student in the History Department at Concordia University. Her almost 10 years of experience as a classical cello performer inspired her to focus on sound studies and history.
Anne-Marie Shink
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Tomber amoureux d’une époque à l’autre.
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C’est banal l’amour au quotidien, un regard qui s’échange, des mains qui se frôlent. Malgré les affirmations des amoureux, qui disent que leur histoire est unique, hors de l’ordinaire, la sociologue remarque bien comment les normes sociales influencent les sentiments du cœur et l’expérience que l’on fait de l’amour au quotidien. À travers cette communication, nous verrons quels sont les codes, les normes et les valeurs qui dirigent nos amours dans trois périodes différentes. L’objectif est de démontrer comment la société s’invite même dans nos moments les plus intimes, même dans la banalité du quotidien.
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Anne-Marie a fait sa maîtrise en sociologie à l’Université de Montréal. Ellepoursuit au doctorat à Concordia sous la direction de Valérie de Courville Nicol. Dans le cadre de sa thèse, elle s’intéresse à la transformation et à la transmission des normes amoureuses en Occident dans les romans d’amour.
9:30 - 10:45 a.m. - Room B
Health and Home
Sólveig Hanson
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The Womb Anatomized: Medical Illustration in Seventeenth-Century Midwifery Handbooks.
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Sólveig Hanson is a graduate student in history at Concordia University. Solveig is interested in histories of medicine and representations of science in print and literature. Solveig is currently examining seventeenth-century physicians’ representations and appropriations of vernacular midwifery practices in medical texts.
Terri Rolfson
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Clean, White Linen and a Convicted Murderer: English Laundresses in Eighteenth-Century England
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Laundress Sarah Malcolm was 22 years old when she was convicted of murder and hung, based on the evidence of her bloodied linen clothing. Malcolm vigorously defended her innocence, claiming it was her own menstrual blood that stained the shift. Clean, white linen emerged as a cultural marker of respectability and virtuous moral character in eighteenth century England. Laundresses like Sarah, primarily women and girls of lower rank, conveyed these societal values through their labour. It is deeply ironic that Sarah’s own bloodied linen signalled to the jury not just presumed physical evidence, but an underlying confirmation that her character was as sullied as her linen and capable of committing such a heinous crime.
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Terri Rolfson is in the MA Thesis program, Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. She is researching female laundry labour in eighteenth century England to pursue her scholarly interests of women’s history, material culture and the global textile trade.
Ashley Sims
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‘For the usse of my wyffe and childring’: family life & consumption, findings from a household account book, 1664-1676
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On April 10, 1667 John Clerk sat down to record his household’s expenditures for the week. The entries made in early April were not out of the ordinary by any means: bread and beef for the household, a new pair of shoes for his eldest son, payment to a local weaver, and payment to a physician for treating his wife when she was ‘taken to bed with fever’. Records like these allow historians to access the ordinary and exceptional experiences of members of a seventeenth-century household. This paper argues that by analysing the daily lived experiences of members of this household we can arrive at a nuanced understanding of wider familial consumption in the British Isles.
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Broadly, Ashley is interested in the social and cultural history of early modern Britain. Her doctoral research takes two concepts, global/colonial trade networks and household consumption, and seeks to place them in dialogue with each other via a micro historical investigation into the household of Scottish merchant John Clerk (1611-1674).
11a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Room A
Foodways, Food Waste
11a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Room B
Pro-test/Con-test
Lyndon Kirkley
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The Devil in the Dough: Representations and Perceptions of Bakers in Later Medieval England
Bakers in Medieval England do not have a flattering criminal record in the medieval court records of London. Especially during the later medieval period, bakers were often charged with selling underweight bread. Punishment ranged from public shaming to revocation of their licence to bake in London. This project tries to look through the criminal record, and asks if the baker’s world was more mundane, more orderly, efficient, and routine, than the London court records indicate.
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Lyndon Kirkley is a history student at the University of Ottawa. His main research interests are Canadian arctic history, ocean governance and policy, and the history of milk production in Ontario. Aside from history, Lyndon is an avid canoeist, musician, and enjoys baking bread at home.
Pamela Tudge
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Into the Kitchen: Exploring food waste through the life histories of three Canadian women
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Food histories are about cultural identity, gender, food and domestic labour as well as our relationships to material. In this essay, I will explore the food history of domestic waste through the narratives of three Canadian women who came of age between the 1950’s to 1970’s. Additionally, archives from home designs and womens’ magazines complement their lived experience with reflections from the wider 1960’s modernist and feminist movements. The women featured in this study, were born in Canada, Israel and Poland and their intercultural perspectives provide a unique history on how their experience intersects with the evolution of waste and the material cultures of this time.
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Pamela Tudge is a multi-disciplinary researcher and lecturer in Concordia’s Fine Arts Department and a PhD candidate in the Individualized Program. Her doctoral research crosses critical design, history and communications to explore domestic food practices and waste in Canada.
Hannah Sparwasser Soroka
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PSL: Pie, Squash, Liberty?
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The sweet, custard concoction that modern eaters recognize as pumpkin pie—that stalwart of American cuisine—is not the earliest iteration of the dish. By tracing and baking early pumpkin pie recipes from both sides of the Atlantic, I interrogate Cindy Ott’s position that the pumpkin became a symbol of American self-sufficiency and that, post-Revolution, its inclusion in a rich custard pie underscored independence from Britain. Rather, my research suggests tentatively that the incorporation of pumpkin into the American identity came earlier as part of a colonial process that appropriated Indigenous foodways along with Indigenous land.
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Hannah Sparwasser Soroka is a first-year MA student in the Department of History. Hannah’s current project examines allegations of cannibalism against Indigenous peoples and Jews in the mid-seventeenth century. Her research interests include early modern intellectual history, Jewish history, and medical history.
Lauren Laframboise
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La Grève de la fierté”: Protesting deindustrialization in Montreal’s garment industry
On August 15, 1983, 9,500 workers from the Montreal locals of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union went on strike for the first time in 43 years. The strike became known as “la grève de la fierté”, yet, the only major “victory” was in securing a wage freeze rather than the proposed 20% wage cutback. In many ways, the 1983 strike was extraordinary: it was the first labour stoppage in the industry in decades, and it brought thousands of women out on the street in protest. But its result, essentially a failure to make any gains for their working conditions, is profoundly typical in the global story of deindustrialization. Through oral history interviews with former garment workers, this presentation will problematize the “ordinariness” of economic change.
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Lauren Laframboise is a Master’s student in the Department of History at Concordia. Her work focuses on deindustrialization in the apparel manufacturing industry in Montreal, with particular attention to the gendered and racialized impacts of economic change, gentrification and the politics of deindustrializing space.
Julian Sénéchal
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Normalizing the Extraordinary: The Pilgrimage of Grace & the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Context
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In October 1536, protesters from northern England marched to express their displeasure with a shifting political and religious landscape. The Pilgrimage of Grace, as it came to be known, was primarily a response to King Henry VIII’s recent reforms targeting small monastic houses. My interest in this topic lay not with the specific causes of the rebellion itself, but rather with the idea of popular protest as a political tool. Given the few options available to those challenging religious change, I contend that this oppositional movement was built upon quotidian processes integral to late-medieval English society.
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Julian Sénéchal was born and raised in Montréal. He is currently an MA student in Concordia’s History program. Julian is primarily interested in the social and religious histories of medieval England and France.
Charlotte Smith
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Anarchists, Institutions, and (De)Politicized Sites: Contextualizing Injection through the Syringe
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Taking the syringe an object of inquiry, this paper explores political shifts in North American harm reduction practice from the 1980s to the present. How do the boundaries of the syringe shift and change in different socio-political-historical contexts? What subjectivities are enunciated across time and space? What other bodies are present and how do these work alongside the syringe? This paper reappraises the existing literature by focusing on the materiality of the syringe in the injecting drug use event and explores its shifting significance within grassroots networks and institutionalized practice in hopes of achieving a better and different understanding of North American harm reduction.
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Charlotte is an M.A. student in the Sociology Department at York University. Their current research engages with activist work of people who use drugs to explore how dominant narratives of drug use might be destabilized and reconceptualized according to people’s diverse experiences.
1:15 - 2:30 p.m. Room A
Committing to Memory
Giselle Gonzalez Garcia
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Dying in Havana: Microhistory of the Irish Immigrants buried in the General Cemetery, 1859-1862
The history of the Irish in the Spanish Caribbean is that of their ‘invisibility’. They were not numerous or achieved notoriety; they were rather common individuals pressured into seeking out employment on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This paper rescues the fragmented history of a group of Irish men and women that died in Havana between 1859 and 1862. From death records it is possible to reconstruct their ordinary lives in Colonial Havana. The cemetery is not a place designed to narrate the personal stories of those laid to rest there, however, it can be a key instrument of our collective memory.
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Giselle Gonzalez Garcia obtained her BA in History at the University of Havana in 2016. She is currently a second year MA student at Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies, member of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies, and is one of the authors of Ireland & Cuba: Entangled Histories (2020).
Stefan Hodges
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Making a Séance: Working-class erasure and apparition in the commemoration of Winnipeg’s General Strike of 1919
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Inspired by recent scholarship that considers post-industrial interpretations of industrial heritage, this paper historicizes the developing script of a musical set during the Winnipeg General Strike to ask: What historical aspects of Winnipeg’s working-class radical politics are (un)intentionally brought into the post-industrial present? Paying attention to what is made visible and invisible by the playwrights, the paper seeks to uncover old ghosts that have resisted decades of erasure through deindustrialization and gentrification. One character in particular echoes the radical resistance of anarchist Jewish women in Winnipeg, and urges us to consider the influence of Emma Goldman’s political theory in the years leading up to the General Strike of 1919.
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Stefan Hodges is a geography student living in Montreal via Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory. He is interested in the changing landscape of resistance in Winnipeg’s private rental market, and inspired by radical softness and the antagonistic force of humour.
Eimear Rosato
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The Holy Cross Incident and Memory of the Northern Ireland Conflict
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Taking the Holy Cross Incident and oral history interviews, conducted with young people from the Ardoyne community, I will use this as an avenue to discuss the memory of the conflict in Northern Ireland (NI). Long-lasting affects such as tensions and segregation continue and have ramifications upon issues such as housing and education. North Belfast, alone has twenty-four interfaces and boundaries; many of these are highly contentious and are frequently the site of low-level conflict, with one example being the Holy Cross incident. This presentation will focus on individual, social and intergenerational memory, the embedded nature of conflict-related memory within space, and how we remember in NI.
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Eimear Rosato is a second year PhD student within the Department of History and School of Irish Studies at Concordia University. Her research focuses on Irish History, Memory Studies and Oral History.
1:15 - 2:30 p.m. Room B
Purchase(d) Power
Taylor Antoniazzi
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Books By Women, For Women, And About Women: An Oral History of Everywomans Books in Victoria B.C., 1975-1997
Everywomans Books was a non-hierarchical, collectively run bookstore that sold feminist literature in Victoria, B.C. from 1975 to 1997. This presentation will examine how the ordinary, everyday act of reading politicized women and created momentum for the local women’s movement. It will also explore the significance of the bookstore’s location in a smaller, less political city. The collective largely avoided fraught political debates and preoccupied themselves with the mundane day-to-day of running a feminist business. This approach helped Everywomans become the last surviving feminist bookstore run by a non-profit all-volunteer collective in Canada, but it also may have created exclusions for different groups of women.
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Taylor Antoniazzi recently completed her Master’s in History at the University of Victoria with a focus on Canadian and women’s and gender history. She also holds a Master’s in Intercultural German Studies from the University of Waterloo.
Priya Kumar
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It’s a Mall World After All: Teenage Mall Culture in Late-Twentieth Century America
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In the mid-twentieth century, shopping malls were designed and built to serve the sparse—although expanding—suburban neighborhoods but quickly became a ubiquitous facet on the American landscape. The ethos of the shopping center was a belief that malls could serve not only the commercial needs of suburbia but also that they could foster a sense of community. This tension between serving public needs and private interests was fundamental to the formation and proliferation of shopping malls. Teenagers in particular exemplified this tension in both their submission to the commercial lure of shopping centers as well as their appropriation of its physical space.
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Priya Kumar is a second-year Master of Art student in the Department of History at Concordia University. Her research generally concerns consumerism, popular culture, and everyday spatial practices with a particular focus on the latter half of the twentieth century.
Thomas Macmillan
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The Ku Klux Klan, Chamber of Commerce, and the Struggle for Municipal Power: A case study of political reform in Portland, Maine
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In the present day, the structure of city government is often left unconsidered by the majority of residents. Whether the city has a strong, weak, or even no mayor is sometimes considered unimportant in an era of globalized trade. However, a century ago in the United States, this issue loomed large and often dominated local politics. This paper examines this often marginalized topic through a study of the relationship between nativism and urban reform in Portland, Maine. It does so by comparing the various unsuccessful municipal charter reform efforts from 1897-1921 with the successful, Klan-backed effort in 1923.
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Thomas MacMillan was born and raised in Portland, Maine and is a current PhD student at Concordia University. He studies transnational North American labour history and its interaction with the socialist movement. He is the co-author of a forthcoming chapter in Interpreting Labor and Working-Class History at Museums and Historic Sites.