By Mark Humphries In the last few months, there has been a growing debate about how historians should respond to AI. And that’s a good thing. I’ve argued that we need to engage with the technology or risk becoming irrelevant. Recent pieces in Active History by Mack Penner and Edward Dunsworth make the case for why we should approach AI… Read more »
By Fionnuala Braun Every month, my team at SPHERU (Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit) meets to discuss the progress of our work and share professional development ideas. At the first meeting of the year, we all had to tell a bit about ourselves: our name, degree, and what project we were assigned to. Working around the room, it… Read more »
Krenare Recaj In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail – showing photos and drawings – of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly… Read more »
This article is cross-posted with Borealia: Early Canadian History, where it was published on 23 October 2023. E.A. Heaman I am very sorry to see Quebec raising the fees on students not from Quebec. A long time ago I was one of those out-of-province students. I grew up in British Columbia and had never been east when I transferred from… Read more »
Elizabeth Mancke Academic press editors are notorious for advising future and recent PhDs to remove the historiographical chapter as a first step in revising their dissertation for publication. This begs the question: If press editors do not consider historiographical chapters publishable material, why do so many dissertation committees require them? Why are they deemed a necessary part of the doctoral… Read more »
With the start of the new year,[1] the editorial collective at ActiveHistory.ca thought it would be useful to share some data about the performance of the website, along with some brief analysis of what this data tells us about how it is being used by readers. At the end of this piece, we invite readers to chime in and tell… Read more »
Meredith Terretta (for the uOttawa Antiracist History Group) Too often, a consideration of students has gone missing in conversations about race unfolding on university campuses across Canada this year. It is as if one skill professors have yet to learn is how to actively listen to their students. All of them. Including racialized students for whom our institution, perhaps like… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse Do midterms have any point? Do tests? Quizzes? Finals? These questions outline the scope of a discussion that recently drew considerable discussion among historians on Twitter.[1] The conversation was both apt and timely. It is apt because it goes to the heart of teaching and learning; it is timely because Covid-19 — and a range of other… Read more »
From Tenure-Track and Tenured Faculty Precarity in History is our discipline’s great challenge today. As the Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto puts it: “There is a crisis in working conditions for precariously employed history professors in Canadian universities. It is a crisis decades in the making; it has taken a profound personal and collective toll on generations of historians.” All too… Read more »
Bryn Coates-Davies The Emperor’s Club (2002, directed by Michael Hoffman) stars Kevin Kline as a History teacher who works at a prestigious boys’ boarding school in the 1970s. Kline’s character, William Hundert, is a strict teacher of the history of the Roman Empire. He teaches a very structured class until Sedgewick Bell, a senator’s son, certified bad boy, and potential… Read more »
