History

When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist preacher, wrote to defend a clause in the 1846 Common School Act banning the use of American textbooks, he pulled out all the stops. Not only were such books “anti-British, in every sense of the word,” they were a threat to the colony’s very survival. “[I]n precisely those parts of Upper Canada where the United States School Books had been used most extensively,” he railed, “there the spirit of insurrection in 1837 and 1838, was most prevalent.” While Ryerson thundered in public, however, his fellow preachers quietly went about their usual business of filling the shelves of the colony’s burgeoning Sunday school libraries with books imported in bulk from the United States. Although historians have tended to take Ryerson’s public censure of American schoolbooks at face value, this paper argues that his views were more complicated and can only be fully understood in the context of Methodist efforts to establish Sunday school libraries across the colony in the preceding decades. More than just early sites for the promotion of basic literacy and sectarianism, these denominational libraries functioned as vibrant transnational spaces where Canadian Methodists developed an experienced and complex understanding of a wider North American market for schoolbooks and juvenile literature. Although at times constrained by political necessity, Ryerson soon recuperated this broader understanding of the market to develop policies in the early 1850s that not only eschewed his earlier anti-American rhetoric, but also led to the pervasive adoption of American schoolbooks in Upper Canada’s emergent common school and public libraries.

When John Wesley died in 1791, everyone knew that his official biography would be a bestseller. But early confusion over whom Wesley intended to safeguard his property and take possession of his personal papers led to a protracted struggle over who ought to have the sanctioned right to interpret Wesley’s long life to the wider reading public. This paper argues that as the dispute over Wesley’s biography intensified among his followers, the themes and language that emerged helped to prepare the ground for later conflicts and schisms between preachers and people that would define Methodist history for decades to come.

This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada after the War of 1812 had a profound influence on the evolution of Methodist religious identity north of the border. While they helped to foster the denomination’s remarkable postwar recovery, these periodicals also served to reinvigorate languishing transnational ties binding Canadian and American Methodists together at a time when anti-Americanism was on the rise. As Canadians and Americans read about Methodism’s advances on both side of the border, and as Canadians patterned the growth of Sunday schools and other missionary activities on American models, the linkages uniting North American Methodists into a single imagined community of readers only strengthened. The sustained distribution of these periodicals also did much to prepare the ground for the later introduction of Canadian Methodism’s own denominational weekly, the Christian Guardian, in 1829.

While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, Joss Whedon demonstrated a remarkably consistent reluctance to follow a similar course in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its successful spin-off Angel. Some critics have suggested, however, that Whedon's reliance on folkloric antecedents resulted in two distinct but fundamentally irreconcilable portrayals of the human soul as both a metaphor for human moral agency and as the reified seat of individual identity and conscience. This paper argues by contrast that the ongoing tension between these two representations—one existential and the other ontological—opened the way for Whedon and his writers explore questions about human identity from inexact and shifting moral perspectives that were unusually nuanced.

This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's early novels: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), and the Greater Trumps (1932).  It argues that Williams used these objects as more than furniture around which to build compelling narratives, but as material artifacts imbued with mystical and magical properties to illustrate his own deeply held Christian belief about the fundamental relationship that exists between goodness and mere being itself.

When American Methodist preachers first arrived to Upper Canada they brought more than a contagious religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century during a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms.

The Methodist Book Concern occupied a central place in all this conflict as it powerfully shaped and subverted the religious and political identities of Canadian Methodists, bankrolled the bulk of Methodist preaching and missionary activities, enabled and constrained evangelistic efforts among the colony’s Native groups, and clouded Methodist dealings with the British Wesleyans and other religious competitors north of the border. Even more importantly, as Methodists went on to assume a preeminent place in the province’s religious, cultural, and educational life, their ongoing reliance on the Methodist Book Concern played a crucial part in opening the way for what would later become the lasting acceptance and widespread use of American books and periodicals across the province as a whole.

People's Protests: Democracy, Marginalization, and Populist Futures
The growth of populist movements in places ranging from the United States to Italy to the Philippines has sparked fears of democracy's demise. At its heart, however, populism is animated by a self‐declared democratic impulse that offers a response to extant political, economic, and social arrangements that leave in their wake real or perceived inequalities that large segments of a population may experience as intolerable. These often link to cultural and social anxieties that mobilize a politics of fear that can be expressed in racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and can also express a rejection of globalization, international trade agreements, environmental regulation, taxes, the genteel norms of representative democracy, and generally of the entire institutional infrastructure that they feel has left them adrift. Populist actors thus favour a majoritarian ethos that is illiberal in its vision and totalizing in its ambition. By reframing these fears as a threat to social decency and to the values of openness, liberal urban elites seek to delegitimize populists' political and economic concerns, and thus aim to maintain the status quo. Hann (2019) promotes ethnography as a unique method for "illuminat[ing] populist world views and the mechanisms through which elites of various kinds seek to shape them," and in so doing may offer an empirically grounded view of sociocultural dynamics that are elided within contemporary analyses of the populist turn. This paper examines the connections between economic marginalization and populist protest, exploring how wealth disparities and social class undergird protest movements in the Philippines. This  papers is addressing issues regarding economic marginalization and populism from a globally comparative perspective. The questions answered are: What are the origins, aims, and purposes of the resurgence of populist protest? How are economic, social, and political marginalization interlinked through populist protest? How does economic marginalization provide a particular lens into the tensions between the ideals of public discourse and local, lived realities?

This dissertation argues that we can have a better, more effective illustrated historiography; that we can construct and communicate historical arguments that combine words and images, considering clear nomenclature, conventions and standards; and that we can develop an analytical and critical discourse about verbal-visual or “multiform” arguments and knowledge. 
We can do so because this dissertation offers a new analytical approach to historiography that combines words and images. This approach conceptualizes illustrated historiography and arguments as “multiform,” to emphasize their hybrid nature, and enhance the awareness of the various forms this hybridity takes. My investigation of this hybridity provides terminology to describe nuances of textual multiformity; analytical methods to explore the structure and function of “multiform arguments” (MFAs); and, finally, directions for future empirical research that will help scholars construct MFAs more effectively, and deepen our understanding of “multiform grammar.”
This dissertation analyzes five MFAs from five different publications that explore pre-modern individualism in Europe (ca. 1050-1600). Their debate is on where and when individualism developed; what its catalysts, and cultural and social features were; and how to define “individual.” These illustrated publications range from 1958 to 2015. While the first publication was illustrated after the historian’s death, the other four were illustrated by the historians themselves. Therefore, the analysis of those five MFAs shows how historians and illustrators create historical notions, using primary sources of both verbal and visual sorts, and how they communicate those notions by juxtaposing words and images in printed books.
Analyzing MFAs from a discourse that historicizes the self, and that addresses the methodological and epistemological problematic of the historian’s self doing so, promotes self-awareness, and analogy between selves and MFAs. Drawing on studies from historiography, linguistics, art history, literary criticism, psychology and computer science, this dissertation concludes that the rhetorical devices that serve historians in depicting the past through MFAs are the same devices that have enabled institutions and individuals to construct “identities” for “individuals.” Thus, awareness of multiformity in the past and its representation increases the effectiveness of using MFAs, as it illuminates the ideologies and playfulness that prevail between words and images.

Presented at the 36th Canadian Conference of Medieval Art Historians, (April 1-2, 2016, University of Laval, Quebec, Canada).

St Thomas Becket was one of the most popular and complex saints in medieval England. In 1154, Thomas Becket became the royal chancellor of Henry II of England. Becket and the king quickly became close friends and remained so until the former became the archbishop of Canterbury in 1164. When Becket refused to support the royal policies against the church, Henry II quickly declared his friend a royal enemy. The enmity persisted even after Becket’s return to England in 1170. On the fateful night of December 29, 1170, King Henry II’s knights assassinated Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, inside Canterbury Cathedral.
The dramatic death of the archbishop transformed him from a political enemy of Henry II into a martyred saint seemingly overnight. On 21 February, 1173, not even three years after the assassination, Pope Alexander III canonized Becket. Artifacts bearing the image of the saint were dispersed across Europe, and liturgies honouring the saint were composed. Many scholars have analyzed the iconography of St Thomas in art, but the image of Becket in the liturgies has rarely been examined. I shall compare the representation of Becket’s vita in artifacts and liturgies. With special attention to the representation of the death of the saint, I shall argue that the Offices for his feast day portray the saint in a more complex manner by transforming him into a hero who served many roles throughout his life, gradually transitioned himself into a holier man, and only through martyrdom attained a whole identity.