Natalie Cornett's book is published:听 (Cornell University Press, 2024)

The Politics of Love听describes the history of Polish intellectual and cultural life, which covertly flourished at home and abroad despite imperial repression between Poland's two great uprisings in 1830鈥�1831 and 1863.听Natalie Cornett focuses her study on a group of educated women known as the "Enthusiasts" (Entuzjastki), who were united by their commitment to live as independent women despite the intense nationalism that put the nation above all鈥攊ncluding class and gender.

The Enthusiasts, led by Narcyza 呕michowska, emphasized sororal love and homosocial bonding in their program to contest both an oppressive imperial regime and constrictive gender roles. Their affective relationships with each other and their decision to remain unmarried, childless, or divorced violated accepted conventions and the patriotic emphasis on the Polish family. By drawing on a large corpus of their letters, diaries, police files, and published works, Cornett describes the Enthusiast movement from its emergence in the 1840s to the death of Narcyza 呕michowska, in 1876.

The Politics of Love听describes how the Polish intelligentsia was so monomaniacally focused on the struggle for independence that discussion of other social questions was dismissed as "unpatriotic." Its dismissal of the Enthusiasts as socially deviant, despite the Enthusiasts' support for the national cause, reveals the limitations of nationalism as a binding agent and demonstrates how Polish women appropriated and contributed ideas about women's emancipation, nationalism, and religion in a globalizing era of increasing literacy and transnational exchange.

Carmen Miller's听book is published:听 (University of Toronto Press, 2024)

In a remarkable tale of tragedy, war, family conflict, and imperial diplomacy,听The Black Box听presents a collective biography of four generations of women in an elite Nova Scotia family during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. These intelligent, educated, artistic women were pragmatic and autonomous persons who contributed to the development, maintenance, defence, and management of the Borden family鈥檚 material resources.

Illustrating the changing nature of the time, the book explores the adventurous and curious lives of women who moved at the highest levels of society. It examines how the synergies of their private and public lives redefined their place in society during an era when the state and religion became more active and private lives more public. It also demonstrates the role and importance of the material components of social power, such as dress, residence, clubs, and travel.

Drawing on archival material retained by the family, the book reveals how the Borden family defined, secured, and sustained its status in society.听The Black Box听is a unique record of an elite family鈥檚 response to the changing political economy of imperial Canada.

Carman Miller is a professor emerita in the Department.

Brian Cowan (ed.)听volume is published:听听(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024)

A Cultural History of Fame examines the concept of fame and its manifestations - in ideas, places, artefacts, and people - across the last 3000 years. The work is divided into 6 volumes, with each volume covering the same topics, so readers can either study a period/volume or follow a topic across history. Brian Cowan has edited volume 4, about the Age of Enlightenment

Judith Szapor and Michael L. Miller's (eds.) book is published:听(Bergahn Books, 2024)

In 1920, the Hungarian parliament introduced a Jewish quota for university admissions, making Hungary the first country in Europe to pass antisemitic legislation following World War I.听Quotas听explores the ideologies and practices of quota regimes and the ways quotas have been justified, implemented, challenged, and remembered from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century. In particular, the volume focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, with chapters covering the origins of quotas, the moral, legal, and political arguments developed by their supporters and opponents, and the social and personal impact of these attempts to limit access to higher education.

Don Nerbas et al., eds. book is published:听 (University of Toronto Press, 2024)

In nineteenth-century Canada, the Square Mile was an elite residential district in Montreal that represented a dramatic new concentration of wealth.听Montreal's Square Mile听chronicles the history of the Square Mile, including the diverse and far-reaching sources of its making and its twentieth-century transformations.

Bringing together the work of leading scholars from a wide range of historical investigation fields, this collection tells the story of the Square Mile from its origins to its decline. Spanning the interconnected worlds of family and home life, business and high politics, architecture and urban redevelopment, this interdisciplinary and richly illustrated volume presents a new account of the history of the Square Mile and an investigation of its impact beyond the immediate urban environment.

Jacob Blanc's book is published: (Duke University Press, 2024)

In听The Prestes Column, Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927. Blanc鈥檚 analysis of the Prestes Column is a showcase of what he calls 鈥渋nterior history.鈥� At a pivotal moment in national politics, the long march of the column came to embody the constructed duality of Brazil鈥檚 interior: a space that was seen by coastal elites as simultaneously backward鈥攊n relation to the more modern coast鈥攁nd dormant, an expanse of untapped potential waiting to be brought into the nation. Drawing on a range of materials, from officers鈥� memoirs and local eyewitness accounts to physical memorials and government archives, Blanc鈥檚 framework of interior history helps explain the column鈥檚 initial rise to fame and also its enduring legacy across the twentieth century, offering a new approach for the study of space and nation.

Malek Abisaab and Michelle Hartman's book is published: (Syracuse University Press, 2024)

Conspicuously missing from narratives of the Lebanese Civil War are the stories of women who took part in daily social activism and political organizing during the tumultuous conflict. What the War Left Behind documents their stories, with eight women directly sharing their experiences of action and survival through the hardship of war.

What the War Left Behind brings together oral histories of women from a range of political affiliations, socioeconomic classes, and religious identities. These histories present an alternative image of women during war, highlighting the actions of those who sought to make life better for themselves and their neighbors during conflict. By centering women鈥檚 voices in the war, Abisaab and Hartman present a new perspective on an oft-discussed historical era, demonstrating the power of resistance during difficult times. These translated texts showcase the active roles women take during wartime and how women鈥檚 political efforts are an essential part of Lebanese history.

David Porter's book is published: (Columbia University Press, 2023)

China鈥檚 last imperial dynasty governed a vast and culturally diverse territory, encompassing a wide range of local political systems and regional elites. But the Qing empire was built and held together by a single imperial elite: the more than two million members of the hereditary Eight Banner system who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy. The banner population was multiethnic, linked by shared membership in a clearly demarcated status group defined in law and administrative practice. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master.

Slaves of the Emperor听explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family鈥檚 most important supporters. David C. Porter traces how the banner system created a service elite through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, he uncovers crucial parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.听Slaves of the Emperor听provides a new framework for understanding the structure and function of elites both in China and across Eurasia in the early modern period.

Slaves of the Emperor has been shortlisted for the 2024 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association.

Lynn Kozak's听book is published: 听(黑料不打烊-Queen's University Press, 2023)

Between 2010 and 2017, Canada experienced an efflorescence of Greek tragedy, led by independent Montreal theatre company Scapegoat Carnivale鈥檚 energetic performances of Euripides鈥檚 Medea and Bacchae and Sophocles鈥檚 Oedipus Tyrannus. The performances featured crisp new translations by co-artistic director Joseph Shragge, large casts, and full-throated sung choruses.

Scapegoat Carnivale鈥檚 trilogy of these familiar but rarely performed plays is at the core of this volume, which includes all three novel play scripts, the company鈥檚 stage directions, and helpful annotations that elucidate Greek names and cultural references and place the textual choices in the context of the productions themselves as well as the long manuscript traditions germane to each tragedy. The result sheds light on both the ancient Greek texts and contemporary performance practice, as do accompanying essays introducing the reader to Greek tragedy in fifth-century Athens, reception theories, each play鈥檚 themes and cultural resonances, and how Scapegoat鈥檚 approach to each play fits into broader global trends of performance and reception.

Scapegoat Carnivale鈥檚 Tragic Trilogy invites readers from all backgrounds to encounter these plays, whether they are looking at Greek tragedy for the first time or the fiftieth. It gives everyone the tools to understand where these plays came from, offers insights into how they can and should be performed now, and shows why they are more relevant than ever in contemporary theatre and in life.

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey's book is published: (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa.

By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles,听Cross-Border Cosmopolitans听reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans听was awarded the Canadian Historical Association鈥檚 , as well as Honourable Mention for the Frederick Turner Jackson Prize.

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert's book is published: (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)

This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out.

Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico's mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision鈥攁 moral ecology鈥攖hat defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.

Subho Basu's book is published: (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Intimation of Revolution studies the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s by showcasing the interactions between global politics and local social and economic developments. It argues that the revolution of 1969 and the national liberation struggle of 1971 were informed by the 'global sixties' that transformed the political landscape of Pakistan and facilitated the birth of Bangladesh. Departing from the typical understanding of the Bangladesh as a product of Indo-Pakistani diplomatic and military rivalry, it narrates how Bengali nationalists resisted the processes of internal colonization by the Pakistani military bureaucratic regime to fashion their own nation. It details how this process of resistance and nation-formation drew on contemporaneous decolonization movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America while also being shaped by the Cold War rivalries between the USA, USSR, and China.

Ed Dunsworth's听recently published collaboration with Gabriel Allahdua: 听(Between the Lines, 2023)

In this singular firsthand account, a former migrant worker reveals a disturbing system of exploitation at the heart of Canada鈥檚 farm labour system.

When Gabriel Allahdua applied to the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Canada, he thought he would be leaving his home in St. Lucia to work in a country with a sterling human rights reputation and commitment to multiculturalism. Instead, breakneck quotas and a culture of fear dominated his four years in a mega-greenhouse in Ontario. This deeply personal memoir takes readers behind the scenes to see what life is really like for the people who produce Canada鈥檚 food.

Now, as a leading activist in the migrant justice movement in Canada, Allahdua is fighting back against the Canadian government to demand rights and respect for temporary foreign labourers.听Harvesting Freedom听shows Canada鈥檚 place in the long history of slavery, colonialism, and inequality that has linked the Caribbean to the wider world for half a millennium鈥攂ut also the tireless determination of Caribbean people to fight for their freedom.

Harvesting Freedom is the winning entry for the from the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.