Congratulations to Ph.D candidate Rebecca Brain, who has received a travel award from the American Association for the History of Medicine to attend and present a paper at their conference in Alabama in April.

Paris and Berlin, anyone? Faculty from the University of Regina will be leading a study tour of Paris and Berlin this coming spring/summer, with the focus on history and modernity. U of S students are invited to join up. An informational meeting will be held this Thursday, 3 February, Kirk Hall 146, at 2 p.m.

An action shot from today's Honours Colloquium lunch.
Click on the image to enlarge.

The 8th Annual Michael Swan Honours Colloquium was held today at the Diefenbaker Centre, and was a resounding success. What's Up salutes the honours students who presented stimulating and polished papers; the audience of students, faculty, and friends who turned up out in droves on a lovely but absurdly cold day; and Martha Smith-Norris, who made the whole thing happen.

A friendly crowd of students, faculty and friends awaits
the start of the next panel of speakers at the Honours
Colloquium. Click on the image to enlarge it.

The History Grad Students Colloquium this Thursday at 7:30 in the Faculty Club will feature three speakers:
Rachel Hatcher: "Truth & Forgetting in Guatemala"
Robert Paul: "The Domestic President: The School Desegregation, Welfare Reform and Environmental Policies of Richard M. Nixon"
Jennifer Jozic: "The Mental Furniture of Educated Men: Ulster, Linen and the Plantation Period"

Everyone Welcome. All graduate students are encouraged to attend.

CMRS Lecture Series: Brent Nelson, Department of English, will speak on "Shakespeare's Anatomy of Curiosity in The Tempest". Thursday January 27th, STM Room 344B. Refreshments at 3:30, talk at 4:00. Everyone welcome.

Bill Waiser will present a paper on "Our Shared Destiny: Saskatchewan in 1905 and 2005" at a seminar, The Heavy Hand of History: An Analysis 100 Years in the Making, hosted by the University of Regina in conjunction with the Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy. Bill is one of four distinguished speakers on the panel. The seminar runs from 8:30 to 12pm on Friday, January 14th. Registration is limited to 40, so be sure to book in advance if you are considering making the trip. Click here for further details.

You do not have to drive all the way to Regina to hear Bill, mind you. As we have noted, he is back on tv and now on radio as well. More to the point, he will be appearing live and in person right here on campus on Monday, January 24 to give the final capstone lecture in the Centennial Lecture Series: "Saskatchewan's Inauguration Party". Place Riel Theatre (Arts 241). 7:30 pm. Everyone Welcome.

The 8th Annual Michael Swan Honours Colloquium will be held Friday, January 21st from 9:00:am to 4:30pm in the Diefenbaker Centre. The colloquium offers the department community the chance to gather and celebrate the excellent work of our graduating class of honours students. This year's program features six sessions and twenty-two papers on a wide array of topics. Come out and enjoy not just a free lunch and a damn fine piece of cake, but a day of good company and fine scholarship. Everyone welcome. Click here to see the program. (Hint: While you wait for your old version of Adobe Reader to load, see below regarding the Adobe Reader 7.0.)

Adobe Reader 7.0 has just been released, and it is worth having. Adobe Reader is the free program nearly all of us use to read .pdf files, including journal articles available online through the library. Version 7.0 has various refinements, but the one that matters most is that the program now loads much more quickly. Adobe Reader 7.0 is available for MAC, Windows, and Linux users, is still free, and is available by clicking here.
(A word of warning, however, for those of you who already have the full, purchased version of Adobe Acrobat Professional on your hard drive, which enables you to create as well as read .pdf files. It will be overwritten by Adobe Reader 7.0 if you follow the default setup options, which loads Adobe Reader in the same directory as Adobe Acrobat. If this happens, you will lose the additional functions of the purchased version. Be sure to load the two programs in separate directories.)

The Library of Congress' s Rare Book & Special Collections Division has released a new digital collection, The Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake, available on the Library's Global Gateway
Web site at: http://international.loc.gov/intldl/drakehtml/. The Kraus Collection comprises important primary and secondary materials about Drake's voyages throughout the then Spanish territory of the Americas. It consists of 60 items--16 manuscripts, 29 books, 8 maps and views, and 7 medals and portraits. The materials range in date from 1579 to 1765. Texts are in English, Latin, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and French.

Ever just know that you wrote something brilliant once that applies to what you need to write now, but have no idea what file it might be in on your hard drive? We here at What's Up have been test-driving Copernic Desktop, a free download for Windows users that sets itself up to index your hard drive for files and, if you like, e-mails and web pages. It can find any word or phrase on your hard drive with lightening speed, putting the pathetic Windows search facility to shame. It is easy and intuitive to use. We are told that it contains no spyware and makes minimal use of your computer's resources. Unlike Google Desktop, Copernic Desktop can search the content of WordPerfect and pdf files, as well as MS Word. What's Up's lawyers remind us to remind you that we bear no responsibility for what happens to you if you try this software, and cannot guarantee that any writing you recover really is brilliant. Even so, if you wish to learn more, click here.

Congratulations to Ph.D. candidate Brendan Edwards, whose book Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada Before 1960 has just been published by Scarecrow Press. The book explores the pre-1960 history of print culture and libraries as it relates to the First Peoples of Canada -- a history largely untold before now. Click here to learn more.

Bill Waiser is back on the air. Looking Back, his celebrated series of historical vignettes about Saskatchewan, is being repeated on CBC Newshours every Tuesday in a run-up to the Provincial centennial, and Bill is also doing a new bi-weekly history "column" for CBC radio's Afternoon Edition, starting Tuesday January 4th.

Public Lecture. On Friday, 14 January Simonne Horwitz (St. Antony's College, Oxford) will speak on “Urbanisation and Health Seeking Practices: A Case Study of Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, South Africa, 1948-1990.” Ms. Horwitz, a Rhodes scholar, is currently in the final year of her D.Phil in Modern History. 10 a.m, Room 1004, College of Education. Everyone welcome.

Congratulations to Larry Stewart, whose Practical Matter : Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (co-authored with Margaret C. Jacob) has just been published by Harvard University Press. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application. There was nothing preordained or inevitable about the centrality awarded to science. "It is easy to forget", they write, "that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture." Click here to learn more.

HUSA Film Night: The Year of Living Dangerously. Presented by Professor Pamela Jordan, this tense political thriller portrays Indonesia during a deadly power struggle between communists and Islamic military generals in 1965, during the Cold War. Polymath Mel Gibson -- movie star, Scottish historian, theologian -- plays an Australian news reporter who is looking for his "big break." Also starring Sigourney Weaver, this stylish 1983 film is a tale of political intrigue, love/sex, betrayal, and redemption. Thursday, January 20, 6:30 p.m, Place Riel Theatre (Arts 242)
Admission: Free! (Refreshments will be available).

As part of the 2004-2005 Fine Arts Research Lecture Series, John McCannon will be giving a talk entitled "Heroic Retrospection: Idealizations of the Archaic in Fin-de-Siècle Russian Painting." The lecture will be held at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, 16 January 2005, in Quance Theatre (Education Building). All are welcome. For details, see www.usask.ca/music/other_events/farls/lectures.html.

History Grad Student Professionalization Workshop & T.A. Roundtable: This two-part event will take place Friday, January 14th at the Gwenna Moss Teaching & Learning Centre (Main Library, ground floor), from 1:30-4:30 (1:30-3:00 Workshop; 3:00-4:30 Roundtable).

This year the traditional winter follow-up to the fall TA Workshop, the TA Roundtable, is being preceded by an additional workshop on what we are calling “professionalization”. It sometimes helps to think of the history profession as a particular (peculiar might be a better word) culture, one with its own protocols, folkways, silences and taboos. Traditionally, students are left to find their own way into this culture, for better or worse. This workshop is intended to help demystify the profession, smooth the process of acculturation, and, above all, help our current M.A. and Ph.D. candidates make more informed decisions about whether the profession is right for them, whether to continue to a doctorate or on to the job market, and how best to proceed down those paths. All History Grad Students are encouraged to attend.

John McCannon and Frank Klaassen will lead the Professionalization Workshop. It will be followed immediately by the T.A. Roundtable, led by Gordon DesBrisay, in which T.A.s will share their teaching questions, suggestions, tips and tactics. All current T.A.s are encouraged to attend. Retired T.A.s will be most welcome.

All interested faculty are also invited. Food and drink will be served.

Alumnus John Friesen (B.A. Hons., M.A.; Ph.D. Leeds), currently a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, is the next speaker in the 18th Century Studies Dinner Talk series. John will speak Wednesday, January 12th on “‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’: Newtonian Natural Philosophy and the Ancients-Moderns Controversy at Christ Church Oxford”. Drinks start in the Faculty Club lounge at 6:30, dinner downstairs at 7:00. All faculty, grad students, and honours students are welcome to attend, but you must book in advance. Permanent faculty pay $20, everyone else $10. Contact Pat Harpell in the English Department (966-5486) by Friday January 7th to book a place.