Recent News

While the experiences of eighteenth-century Irish and Scottish North American immigrants are in many ways vastly different from our own, some of the challenges they faced are surprisingly comparable to those we might encounter today – even during the current global pandemic.

In this week’s guest blog post, Natasha Sumner and Aidan Doyle reflect on … Read More >

McGill-Queen’s University Press is thrilled to announce that Gregory Forth’s A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society is the winner of The Bookseller’s 2020 Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Forth is the first Canadian author and … Read More >

“Presidents alone do not make foreign policy. Nor can they change it on their own.” National Security Entrepreneurs and the Making of American Foreign Policy

The unprecedented—and at times unusually chaotic—nature of this year’s American presidential election captured international attention, leaving many to wonder at the fate and future of American politics and … Read More >

“This is a guide to living with sound, and especially with noise. Not constantly fighting battles against it, not inflicting it on others, not hiding it, or yourself, under more layers of sound. This is about being a listener, whatever else you also are.” Marcia Jenneth Epstein, Sound and Noise

Noise surrounds us … Read More >

For the first time in the long history of the Olympics, the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games have been postponed until summer 2021 due to COVID-19. Unfortunately, this was not the only sporting event affected by this year’s pandemic—various leagues, tournaments, and competitions had to adapt to this new reality. … Read More >

Devastating wildfires continue to scorch Western United States, an unprecedented and alarming addition to an already intense year of social, medical, and economic instability. We asked historian and MQUP author Alan MacEachern to reflect on the current disaster in the context of his book, The Miramichi Fire: A History.

On 7 October 1825, a … Read More >

“Confession is the primary modality of the internet. It is the force that maintained its impetus through the conversion from analogue to digital, and it remains at the centre of people’s interactions within online culture.” Thomas Waugh and Brandon Arroyo, I Confess!

Whether it be social media posts, online comment boards, or even … Read More >

“Notions of private and public are omnipresent in discussions of architecture and cities. Far from being neutral, they are formulated through normative notions of gender – the very same notions that queer thinking seeks to question.” Olivier Vallerand, Unplanned Visitors

For many, being in quarantine has meant having to adjust and redefine our … Read More >

“While diseases may differ one from another, these essays also show that human reactions to new diseases are relentlessly constant.” Jacalyn Duffin, SARS in Context

For many, when considering the current COVID-19 pandemic, the SARS outbreak that swept across the globe in 2003 comes to mind. While there are significant differences between the … Read More >

“As the Model T Ford was to the 1920s, so are the smartphone, and mobile devices more generally, to the present day.” Gregory Taylor and Catherine Middleton, Frequencies

Providing easy access to our pictures, our music, or social media, our technological identity is strongly dependent on, and affected by, smartphones and mobile devices. … Read More >