Where the Archive Ends: Eighth Annual McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History
At the Eighth Annual McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, students from history and related disciplines met in March at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario to present, explore, and discuss their research about the past in an interdisciplinary and bilingual environment. The keynote address, entitled “On Historians and Their Audiences: An Argument for Teaching (and not just writing) History” was delivered by Dr. Ruth Sandwell, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of University of Toronto. Dr. Sandwell spoke to an audience of approximately 70 people about the importance of historians as educators and combated the view of historians solely as researchers. The address was made possible by a THEN/HiER Small Project Grant, and fit within the organization’s mandate to create a “collaborative network across the diverse fields of history, history education, and school history teaching in Canada.” The conference was organized and run completely by graduate students at the Department of History, Queen’s University, led by conference co-chairs Mary Chaktsiris and Peter Price. Over the two-day conference, 55 papers were presented to showcase graduate student work from across the continent and across the globe. This year’s theme, "Where the Archive Ends," evoked the questioning spirit that lies at the heart of all academic research into the past, and the conference provided a venue for emerging scholars to discuss not only their research but the very nature of their craft.
