Recent News

Slings & Arrows, starring Susan Coyne, Paul Gross, Don McKellar, and Mark McKinney as members of the New Burbage Theatre Festival, was heralded by television critics as one of the best shows ever produced and one of the finest depictions of life in classical theatre. Shakespeare scholars, however, have been ambivalent about the series, at … Read More >

In Restless in Sleep Country, Paul Huebener challenges the conventional view of sleep as a purely personal or biological matter. Instead, he examines it through a cultural lens, revealing how sleep is shaped by societal forces like politics, power, and inequity. By exploring sleep in Canadian and Indigenous contexts, he demonstrates the cultural significance … Read More >

In Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain’s Imperial World, 1618-1968, Stuart Anderson explores the many meanings now attached to the word ‘pharmacopoeia’ in scholarly writing. In this guest blog, he describes the origins and background to the book, some of the problems that can arise, and indicates what scholars can do to ameliorate … Read More >

Mary MacLeod was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. A chronicle of travel through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod’s life and legacy, preserved within landscape and memory. Marilyn Bowering forms an unlikely connection with MacLeod despite differences of culture and language, time and place.

In the piece below, Marilyn Bowering explores … Read More >

Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, directed by Joe Berlinger, explores the rise and fall of Hitler, and features eyewitness testimony of American journalist William L. Shirer.  Ken Cuthbertson, author of A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century, which is the only full biography of Shirer, was interviewed for the six-part … Read More >

Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War argues that world leaders react to status decline by going to war, guided by a nostalgic, virile understanding of what it means to be powerful. Consulting newly declassified documents at the highest levels of decision-making, Matthieu Grandpierron uses the framework of nostalgic virility to provide surprising ways of … Read More >

In the blog post below, Chris Kaposy introduces his new book, The Beautiful Unwanted: Down Syndrome in Myth, Memoir, and Bioethics. In The Beautiful Unwanted, Kaposy reflects on parenting his son with Down syndrome in the midst of a supposed disappearance of people with this condition. Writing from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective, Kaposy presents … Read More >

Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations by Daniel Macfarlane is a reinterpretation of the history of US-Canada relations through environmental and energy issues. In the guest blog below, Macfarlane gives us an introduction to the topic of his book.

Billions of dollars of goods and services cross the Canada-US border daily. Canada is … Read More >

In Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India, Nandini Bhattacharya details the cultural history of medicines in colonial and postcolonial India. In the guest blog below, Bhattacharya gives some important background information and introduces us to her new book.

While researching for and writing Disparate Remedies, I had in mind India’s flourishing pharmaceuticals industry, which expanded exponentially in … Read More >

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is frequently portrayed as an aloof writer, out of step with modern sensibilities. Aesthetic Dilemmas: Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism by Marlo Alexandra Burks re-evaluates his place in twentieth-century European Modernism by arguing that his work is not escapist but instead engages the consciousness of readers through … Read More >