McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges with gratitude the assistance of AMS Healthcare, the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies, the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government Studies in Leadership, Public Policy, and Governance, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, Carleton University, the Donald J. Savoie Institute, the Government of Canada, the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, Livres Canada Books, the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, the Montreal History Group, the Royal Military College of Canada, the Smallman Fund of the University of Western Ontario, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Wellcome Trust for their support of its publishing program. Above all, the Press is indebted to its two parent institutions, McGill and Queen’s universities, for generous, continuing support for the Press as an integral part of the universities’ research and teaching activities.
McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History / 32
McGill-Queen’s/Brian Mulroney Institute of Government Studies in Leadership, Public Policy, and Governance / 9
McGill-Queen’s Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Series / 53
McGill-Queen’s Philosophy of Religion Series / 30
McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies / 38, 40
McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies / 28, 47
McGill-Queen’s Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies /36
McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion / 29
McGill-Queen’s Studies in Urban Governance / 48, 49
States, People, and the History of Social Change / 3, 4, 5
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McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal is on land which long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous Peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. In Kingston it is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek. We acknowledge and thank the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose footsteps have marked these territories on which peoples of the world now gather.
It is my great privilege to have joined McGill-Queen’s University Press this past year, to inherit its storied tradition of publishing impactful, award-winning, and creative scholarship and culturally significant, beautiful books, and to take on the work of leading this remarkable house into its future.
In both its structure and its broad publishing program, mqup embodies a uniquely rich and often challenging plurality that reflects what we know as Canada itself. As a partnership between two leading research institutions in Montreal, Quebec, and Kingston, Ontario, and headquartered in Tiohtià:ke within the Kanien’kéha Nation, the Press spans cities, territories, provinces, nations, and languages. From this position, mqup can serve as an intellectual heart, sustaining and sharing engaged research and writing that advances how we understand ourselves and our histories, the worlds in which we live now, and what possibilities we see for the future.
In our moment of significant geopolitical upheaval, of deep sociocultural and technological shifts, the mission of a university press is more necessary than ever. In an environment of information hyperabundance and distrust, carefully stewarded knowledge is vital. Socially responsible scholarly publishing in this rapidly changing world requires finding an ethical relationship between research excellence, free expression, and a commitment to representing diversity of experience and thought. It requires an ethics of care, an awareness of the needs and realities of others alongside our own and a responsibility to our collective wellbeing, which should inform the knowledges and creative works we put into the world.
Embracing accountability means coming to terms with the consequences of our pasts and of our choices, both individual and collective, which is not easy work. It should not be easy. How do we bring into productive dialogue disparate value systems and perspectives? How do we engage in difficult conversations with respect? How do we tap into our differences as a source of strength – how do we acknowledge and reconcile our wrongs alongside our achievements – to make space for all peoples to flourish? How do we transform our institutions, our systems of knowledge, and the stories we tell to address these questions? As a publisher, this is the work that excites and inspires me.
As we move into a year of reflection on our own past and planning for our future, we are asking these questions alongside the pragmatic and operational challenges of building a strong intellectual culture in such a moment. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to explore the role a university press can play with some of the most passionate, informed minds in the profession. And we will publish great books.
lisa quinn
May 2024
Montreal / Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang
The Hour of Absinthe
A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink
nina s. studer
How colonialism, madness, and murder turned the green fairy into the opium of the West.
At the height of its popularity in the late nineteenth century, absinthe reigned in the bars, cafes, and restaurants of France and its colonial empire. Yet by the time it was banned in 1915, the famous green fairy had become the green peril, feared for its connection with declining birth rates and its apparent capacity to induce degeneration, madness, and murderous rage in its consumers.
As one of history’s most notorious drinks, absinthe has been the subject of myth, scandal, and controversy. The Hour of Absinthe explores how this mythologizing led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore while key historical events, crucial to understanding the story of absinthe, have been neglected or unreported. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit’s relationship with empire. Some claim that French soldiers were given daily absinthe rations during France’s military conquest of Algeria to protect them against heat, diseases, and contaminated water. In fact, the overenthusiastic adoption of the drink by these soldiers, and subsequently by French settlers, was perceived as a threat to France’s colonial ambitions – an anxiety that migrated into French medicine.
Providing keen insight into how local cultural narratives about absinthe shaped what quickly became a global reputation, Nina Studer provides a panoptic view of the French Empire’s influence on absinthe’s spectacular fall from grace.
Nina S. Studer is a research associate at the University of Geneva.
SPECIFICATIONS
Intoxicating Histories
October 2024
978-0-2280-2220-6
£25.99 paper
6 × 9 264pp 21 photos
Prisoners’ Bodies
Activism,
Health,
and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement in Ireland, 1972–1985
oisín wall
How to build a movement demanding human rights – locked up, alone, your only tool your body.
In the early 1970s Irish prisons were overcrowded – there were few rehabilitation programs, medical care was limited, psychiatric care was practically nonexistent, and brutality was commonplace. The Irish prisoners unionized, igniting a movement that helped transform the penal system over the next decade and a half, and whose legacy is still visible today.
Prisoners’ Bodies is the first book on the history of the prisoner-driven movement that sought to revolutionize the prison system in Ireland between 1972 and 1985. Oisín Wall charts the rise and fall of prisoners’ organizations, their changing social networks, tactics, and splits, and the effect that they had on life inside prison, public policy, and society at large. Considering the public discourse around prisons and prisoners during this period, Wall investigates how it shaped and was shaped by the movement. Finally, the book examines the experiences of more than twenty individuals in prison, setting their activism within the context of their lives and their politics. Their stories are reconstructed through oral histories, court records, press reports, prisoners’ publications, and archival material.
Prisoners’ Bodies seeks to amplify the voices of people who have been systemically and institutionally silenced in the history of modern Irish prisons.
“Wall is innovative in his approach to thinking about how prisoners communicate and significantly advances what we know about what happened in Irish prisons at this time.”
William Murphy, author of Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912–1921
Oisín Wall is lecturer at University College Cork.
Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present
steven king
Exploring British attitudes toward welfare fraud across five centuries and their remarkable parallels in contemporary Western societies.
The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes.
In Fraudulent Lives Steven King focuses on the British case in the first ever long-term analysis of the scale, meaning, and consequences of welfare fraud in Western nations. King argues that an expectation of dishonesty on the part of claimants was written into the basic fabric of the founding statutes of the British welfare state in 1601, and that nothing has subsequently changed. Efforts throughout history to detect and punish fraud have been superficial at best because, he argues, it has never been in the interests of the three main stakeholders – claimants, the general public, and officials and policymakers – to eliminate it.
Tracing a substantial underbelly of fraud from the seventeenth century to today, King finds remarkable continuities and historical parallels in public attitudes towards the honesty of welfare recipients – patterns that hold true across Western welfare states.
“A highly original and important work. King’s argument – that contemporary attitudes towards the welfare system in Britain have existed throughout the history of British public welfare, since the foundation of the Poor Law in 1601 – is well-supported by a range of documentary sources covering the time period, and human voices from the recent past.”
Pat Thane, Birbeck College, University of London
Steven King is professor of economic and social history at Nottingham Trent University and co-author of In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900
SPECIFICATIONS
States, People, and the History of Social Change November 2024
978-0-2280-2280-0
£29.99 paper
978-0-2280-2279-4
£99.99 cloth
6 × 9 368pp 13 diagrams, 1 table eBook available
Slow Train to Arcadia
A History of Railway Commuting into London
duncan gager
An exploration of suburban commuting as a social phenomenon in the first city to experience it.
Railway commuting is today a mundane and routine necessity, yet for the Victorians it was a novel experience. It opened up new possibilities of living at a remove from the crowded urban centre while staying connected to its places of work. Commuting helped transform London’s urban landscape, as the compact city of Dickens’s London gave way to the suburban sprawl of the British capital in the early twentieth century.
Slow Train to Arcadia is a history of London’s suburban railway network from the 1830s to 1921 and its impact on urban mobility. The book charts the relationship between the three main actors in the formation of the suburban railway: the state, the railway companies, and the travelling public. While the railway age came quickly to Victorian Britain, commuting took a slower journey to commonplace status. In the 1840s William Gladstone sought to make railway travel accessible to all, but commuting was experienced differently according to class and gender. Slow Train to Arcadia explains why the democratization of commuting proved to be an elusive goal.
Today’s workers are living through a fundamental reversal in the relationship between home and the workplace. For many, a daily commute is being consigned to history, a shift that will have long-term social and economic consequences. Slow Train to Arcadia is a timely exploration of the origins of mass commuting, a similarly transformative period for the daily patterns of working life.
Duncan Gager is associate fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
SPECIFICATIONS
States, People, and the History of Social Change
November 2024
978-0-2280-2276-3
£36.00 paper
978-0-2280-2275-6
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 328pp
The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter Anthropology Upside Down
richard cavell
The first study of the media scholar who turned anthropology on its head.
Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922–2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career. As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953–59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork for media studies. After ten years spent teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto, hosting radio and television shows on the cbc , and doing major research in the Arctic, Carpenter left Toronto and became an itinerant anthropologist. He took up a position in Papua New Guinea, where he countered anthropological practice by handing his camera to the Papuans. Carpenter’s marriage to the artist and heiress Adelaide de Menil made him a truly independent scholar. With the support of the Rock Foundation, founded by de Menil, he collected ethnographical art, curated exhibitions, and edited the materials for a twelve-volume study of social symbolism based on the massive archives created by Carl Schuster. Richard Cavell shows Carpenter – austere, generous, and unpredictable – to also be unwavering in working throughout his career within the framework established by Explorations
The anthropological impetus for media studies has largely been forgotten. This study restores that memory, tracing Carpenter’s work in media and in anthropology over a lifetime of cultural achievements and intellectual convolutions.
Richard Cavell is professor of media studies at the University of British Columbia.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2272-5
£29.99 paper
978-0-2280-2271-8
£99.99 cloth
6 × 9 304pp 40 photos eBook available
It’s Nation Time
A Progressive Defence
jerry white
A case for the continued relevance of national identity for globally minded progressives.
Speaking at the Congress of African People in September 1970, Amiri Baraka said, “In Newark, when we greet each other on the streets, we say, ‘what time is it?’ We always say, ‘It’s nation time!’ Nationalism is about land and nation, a way of life trying to free itself.” National identity and nationhood are too often easily dismissed as retrograde populism or racist exclusion. Instead, they need to be understood as a key part of a vision of globalization that holds the imperatives of diversity and solidarity in a delicate balance.
Jerry White offers a defence of the nation based on the assumption that struggles for national identity have often unfolded in ways that should be familiar to those who defend the political standpoint of the progressive left. Having evolved into something that a wide variety of actors have sought to defend, nations can also serve as a defence against the homogenizing forces of globalization and as havens of diversity in opposition to more singularly minded forms of affiliation. It’s Nation Time is structured as a series of specific case studies that speak to theories of nation and their historical and cultural manifestations. It includes examples as varied as Black nationalism, Simone Weil’s hopes for a postwar France, the first independence period of Georgia, the Bollywood cinema of Nehru-era India, and small or stateless nations such as New
Zealand, Quebec, Ireland, Catalonia, the Métis, the Mohawk, and the Inuit to argue that nationalism is a social form that has much potential and life in it. Broadly internationalist but also deeply insightful about the particular cultures and politics of small nations, It’s Nation Time defends an idea of nation and a form of nationalism that are rooted in the potential for diversity, flexibility, and progressive politics.
“In this rich, nourishing, and nuanced work, Jerry White takes sides: his is a clear and renewed vision of the nation, one open to the world, protective of diversity, structured around culture, and cultivating belonging and solidarity. Among this vision’s many merits is its articulation of Indigenous – Inuit, Métis, Mohawk – understandings of nation and community as models for what nations could and should become. This is a book that deals with major, complex issues with ease and astounding erudition, written in prose that rewards the attention of its readers.”
Gérard Bouchard, author of The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in Comparative History
Jerry White is professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2296-1
£27.99 cloth
6 × 9 344pp eBook available
Worldwise
Édouard Roditi’s Twentieth Century
edited by robert schwartzwald and sherry simon
Essays and portraits by an exemplary citizen of the twentieth century’s world of letters.
Critic, translator, essayist, and gay man, Édouard Roditi (1910–1992) was a singular witness to the twentieth century. His writings over six decades are a unique account of a life lived at the flashpoints of history and at the margins of society, providing acute and unsparing observations of literature and political events.
Worldwise brings together a wide range of Roditi’s writings, renewing appreciation for the polyglot writer. With editors offering insightful background information on Roditi – who was born in Paris and had Sephardic Jewish ancestors of Greek, Spanish, and Italian origin on his father’s side and Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish connections on his mother’s – the book covers topics as diverse as gay life, Sephardic Judaism, and postwar Europe. A published surrealist poet by eighteen, Roditi would become an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, a highly regarded literary translator, and a perceptive social analyst whose outspoken views irritated American, Soviet, and French authorities by turns. Roditi had a knack for spotting promising minds and created literary connections across continents and languages over a long, eclectic, and creative lifetime.
With accounts of his family history and childhood, essays on writers such as Hart Crane and André Breton, and forays into literary, artistic, and political subcultures between the world wars, Worldwise highlights the crucial role Roditi played as a cultural mediator and broker while revealing his trenchant views on art and history in the twentieth century, views that remain salient and enduring in our time.
Robert Schwartzwald, professor in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at the Université de Montréal, is the author of the Queer Film Classics book on Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y.
Sherry Simon, distinguished professor emerita at Concordia University, is the author and editor of several books including Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2292-3
£27.99 paper
978-0-2280-2291-6
£99.99 cloth
6 × 9 288pp eBook available
The Twelfth of February
Canadian Aid for Gender Equality during the Rise of Violent Extremism in Pakistan
rhonda gossen
Can foreign aid help support Pakistan’s efforts in the fight for women’s rights and gender equality?
Pakistan has been a priority country for international development assistance since the early years of its creation. Though Pakistan celebrates National Women’s Day on 12 February each year to commemorate the 1983 women’s march, three decades of war in neighbouring Afghanistan have stoked violent extremism and constrained development gains and gender equality. Canada led the first global efforts to support women’s rights and gender equality in the region.
The Twelfth of February tells the story of the Canadian International Development Agency’s support for women’s organizations and civil society in Pakistan. Rhonda Gossen traces the ebbs and flows of financial aid, drawing on her own unique experience as a development worker as well as compelling interviews with activists, staff at non-governmental organizations, officials, and diplomats. She assesses how women’s organizations work to resist violent extremism and makes the connection between gender inequality and security threats in a volatile region. Despite the influence of Islamic extremism, the gender equality movement in collaboration with civil society in Pakistan did make tangible headway.
The Twelfth of February considers a question that is all too timely: given violent extremism’s devastating impact on development gains including women’s rights, security, and the elimination of gender-based violence, what is the future role for international development?
Rhonda Gossen is a former Canadian diplomat and Canadian International Development Agency manager and a senior advisor to the United Nations.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s/Brian Mulroney Institute of Government Studies in Leadership, Public Policy, and Governance
What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy
jane cooper
The far-flung adventures of a Canadian election observer on a lifelong quest to find hope at the heart of democracy.
Win the votes, buy the votes, steal the votes, invalidate the votes! There is a lot that can go right –and so much that can go wrong – in a Ukrainian election. From the opening of the campaign through to the final decision on the results, it is a rollercoaster ride for the candidates, the election workers, and the international observers who have travelled from afar to see it all.
In What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy long-time election observer Jane Cooper recounts her experience monitoring a municipal election in the mid-sized city of Kirovohrad in 2015. Offering a practical framework for exploring the many things that can go right or wrong during an election, at the core of this story is the inspirational struggle of the poll workers at the bottom of the electoral pyramid to keep the election honest. Cooper describes how election results can be manipulated or falsified and how attempts to do so can be frustrated, providing lessons for citizens of every democratic country. The first work written from the perspective of a Canadian international election observer, the book is an accessible and entertaining story that will appeal to election specialists and the ordinary Canadians who work at the polls on election day, as well as readers who want to learn more about the democratic process in present-day Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has shown us just how endangered democracy is. What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy is an insider’s view of election monitoring that sheds light on Canada’s support for international democracy.
“Cooper’s book is nothing short of a political thriller, providing a nitty-gritty, real-world assessment of how chaotic, unpredictable, and inspirational democratic elections in countries struggling to overcome authoritarian legacies are.”
George O. Liber, author of Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954
Jane Cooper is an independent researcher and election observer based in Ottawa, on .
SPECIFICATIONS
Footprints Series September 2024
978-0-2280-2255-8
£22.99 paper
6 × 9 216pp eBook available
Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America
Writings and Art, Life and Times
i.s. m ac laren
An all-encompassing exploration of the nineteenth-century painter’s documentary record and controversial place in Indigenous studies in North America.
Paul Kane has been called the founding father of Canadian art, and Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America a classic of Canadian literature. Yet his studio canvases are stereotypically generic, and his book is infamous: in word and in image, it depicts vain, vengeful, vicious, violent, and vanishing Indigenous people, disregarding its subjects’ lived experiences and providing little of ethnohistorical significance.
Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America rediscovers the primary fieldwork underlying Kane’s studio art and book and the process by which his sketches and field writings evolved into damaging stereotypes with significant authority in the nineteenth century, in both popular and learned circles.
In 1845 Kane travelled from Toronto to Lake Huron and Wisconsin; he continued from 1846 to 1848 to the upper Great Lakes, to the Prairies, across the Rockies, down the Columbia River, and through Oregon Territory to Puget Sound and Vancouver Island. The sketches he made constitute the first visual record of Indigenous life all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America, which reproduces nearly all his sketches as well as transcriptions of all his field writings, reveals him as a curious traveller fascinated by Indigenous lifeways. Together with a transcription of a draft manuscript for the book, which is not in his handwriting, the text of the first edition of Wanderings of an Artist, and a revised catalogue raisonné, these materials contextualize his travels in fur-trade his-
tory, book history, art history, and ethnohistory, offering scholarly understandings of the lives and histories of the real people Kane described and depicted while providing an authoritative biographical portrait of the artist. I.S. MacLaren reconstructs the colonial processes that turned Kane’s unique encounters with Indigenous peoples into benighted stereotypes, teaching us valuable lessons about what we thought we knew about Kane, how he let himself be turned into an Indian hater, and how historical society endowed him with authority.
A painstaking, panoramic exploration, Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America also studies the artist’s oeuvre in terms of his contemporaries, his technique, and the complicated history of the provenance of the works. The whole lays the groundwork for future discussions of the pertinence of Paul Kane’s documentary record to Indigenous studies in North America.
“More than five decades after Russell Harper highlighted the need for an annotated edition of Wanderings of an Artist, I.S. MacLaren has delivered on this highly desirable outcome. MacLaren’s encyclopedic work will be prized by generations of scholars with a continuing interest in geography, ethnography, literature, and geology, as well as connoisseurs and collectors of frontier art from across the continent.”
David L. Nicandri, emeritus director, Washington State Historical Society
I.S. MacLaren is professor emeritus of history and English at the University of Alberta.
More Richly in Earth A Poet’s Search for Mary
MacLeod
marilyn bowering
The journey to understand the life of a Gaelic Scottish bard and the reach of her poetry across time and space.
Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. While her lyrics were honoured, she was also marginalized, denigrated as a witch, and exiled, both for being a writer and for what she wrote.
Presented as a chronicle of journeys through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod’s legacy, preserved within landscape, memory, and identity. In an act of recovery and restoration, Canadian poet and novelist Marilyn Bowering pieces together the puzzle of radically different accounts of MacLeod’s life, returning to the places the bard once lived with the help of contemporary Scottish Gaelic poets and scholars. Through investigation and imagination, Bowering forms a connection with MacLeod despite vast differences of culture and language, time and place. Their connection deepens as Bowering twines MacLeod’s story with accounts of the people and places that shaped her own life, a connection that ultimately reveals the foundations of Bowering’s artistic vocation to herself. MacLeod’s life and writing, little known today beyond the Gaelic world, harbour cultural truths about a transformative era of war and coloniza-
tion in Gaelic Scotland. Bringing a poetic sensibility to investigative scholarship, More Richly in Earth offers a profound reflection on the necessity of art in all forms.
“A work of imagination and scholarship. [Bowering] has clarified a lot of what was hidden and anybody researching Mary MacLeod and her work would do well to read this book. I highly recommend it.”
Maoilios Caimbeul
Marilyn Bowering is a poet, librettist, and novelist. The author of four novels and numerous books of poetry, she has won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Prix Italia, and the Sony Award. She lives in Victoria, bc .
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2112-4
£22.50 cloth
6 × 9 288pp eBook available
Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War
How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline
matthieu grandpierron
New ways of thinking about power politics and military intervention in an unstable world.
Why do great powers go to war? Why are nonviolent, diplomatic options not prioritized?
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. This nostalgic virility – a system of subjective beliefs about power, bravery, strength, morality, and health –acts as a filter through which leaders articulate glorified interpretations of history and assess their power and their country’s status on the international stage.
In this rigorous study of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Matthieu Grandpierron tests the theory of nostalgic virility against the two more common theoretical frameworks of realism and the diversionary theory of war. Consulting thousands of newly declassified government documents at the highest levels of decision making, Grandpierron examines three specific cases – the early years of the Indochina War (1945–47), the British reconquest of the Falklands in 1982, and the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 – convincingly contending that status-seeking behaviour and nostalgic virility are more relevant in explaining why a leader chooses war and conflict over non-violent, diplomatic options than the dominant frameworks.
Looking to the recent past, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War considers how this new model can be applied to current conflicts – from the Russian war in Ukraine to Chinese actions in the South China Sea – and provides surprising ways of thinking about the relationship between power, decision makers, and causes of war.
“Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War is a fantastic contribution to scholarship on the causes of war and on the dynamics of great power politics. The author develops a genuinely novel theoretical account of why powerful states go to war on their periphery and demonstrates, in persuasive detail, that status and identity concerns associated with a lost sense of virility are more important for explaining observed events than alternatives based on strategic interests and domestic politics.”
David McCourt, University of California-Davis
Matthieu Grandpierron is associate professor of international relations and political science at the Catholic University of Vendée.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s/Brian Mulroney Institute of Government Studies in Leadership, Public Policy, and Governance March 2024
978-0-2280-2036-3
£27.99 paper
978-0-2280-2016-5
£90.00 cloth
6 × 9 288pp 24 tables, 1 photo eBook available
Seapower in the Post-modern World
basil germond
A comprehensive and systematic analysis of the concept and practice of seapower from antiquity to today.
In an era of increasing geopolitical tensions, disruptive technologies, and the rise of authoritarianism, the question of who masters the seas is more than ever central to the future of the international order. But while naval operations, maritime security, and ocean governance have become increasingly relevant in world politics, the concept and definition of seapower have largely been neglected by the scholarship in the international relations field.
Seapower in the Post-modern World fills this gap with an analysis of the naval, economic, and ideational dimensions of seapower from antiquity to today. Exploring the extent to which the permanent elements associated with seapower – such as technology, commerce, and maritime culture –transcend historical periods, Basil Germond frames contemporary seapower as a combination of components including traditional naval power, post-modern conceptions of collective and civilian seapower, and the neo-modern phenomena of maritime territorialization and the naval arms race.
By giving seapower a new conceptual definition, Seapower in the Post-modern World offers key analytical tools for understanding the stability of the global maritime order and seapower’s contribution to global leadership more broadly.
Basil Germond is professor of international security and co-director of the Security Research Institute at Lancaster University.
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2088-2
£27.50 paper
978-0-2280-2087-5
£90.00 cloth
6 × 9 216pp 8 tables, 10 diagrams eBook available
Fate and Life
Who’s Really in Charge?
michael allen fox
A fascinating account of fate’s meanings across time and world cultures that examines its role in understanding and shaping our lives.
Some believe that fate rules our lives, while others dismiss the idea outright. Fate remains central to many cultural outlooks, and in our age of conflict, climate change, and pandemic, it features conspicuously in debates about the future. A careful examination of this important idea – its background, many meanings, and significance for everyday life – is not only informative and intriguing but also timely.
In Fate and Life Michael Fox confronts the idea of fate head on and demonstrates that how we interpret and apply this concept can make it work for rather than against us. Many discussions characterize fate negatively or as part of the occult, representing it as a supernatural force that stifles our freedom. Fateful ideas have also helped rationalize and promote the persecution of certain groups. But viewed more positively, fate can be understood as the given conditions of existence and the imponderable way certain unanticipated events momentously alter the path we follow over time. Thinking about fate teaches us about who we are, how we see the world, and our evaluation of the possibilities of life.
Fate and Life provides a multicultural and global account of how we talk about the idea of fate, how we use and misuse it, and how it contrasts with notions like destiny and karma. Fox’s original perspective – a breakthrough in philosophy and the history of ideas – shows that fate is supported by experience; it is compatible with our sense of agency and purpose and helps us make sense of our lives.
Michael Allen Fox is professor emeritus of philosophy at Queen’s University, adjunct professor at the University of New England in Australia, and the author of several books, including Home: A Very Short Introduction and The Remarkable Existentialists.
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2043-1
£19.99 paper
5.5 × 8.5 186pp eBook available
Logic in the Wild
patrick girard
The power of logic to improve communication, expand creativity, and solve problems in all aspects of life.
Is logic a good tool for making decisions? Can it make us better listeners and help us find coherence in views that we disagree with? Is Sherlock Holmes actually good at logic?
Patrick Girard addresses these and other questions by presenting logic as the guardian of coherence. Logic, Girard argues, finds coherence in the patterns of reasoning across science, religion, and everyday decision making. It helps communities engage safely by replacing contentious debates with shared, constructive reasoning – logic provides neutral ground for the healthy pursuit of common goals and interests. Logic in the Wild employs common sense language, eschewing technical jargon, symbols, and equations. Girard’s attention focuses on logic’s power to find what unites the complex and the simple, the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical. In treating logic not as a passive subject to learn but as an active discipline to engage with, Logic in the Wild teaches us to identify patterns in our own reasoning, which inevitably helps us better confront questions central to everyday life.
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2123-0
£22.99 paper
6 × 9 248pp
eBook available
Patrick Girard is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Auckland.
Making Men in the Age of Sail
Masculinity, Memoir, and the British Merchant Seafarer, 1860–1914
graeme j. milne
How the masculine image of sailing-ship mariners emerged through their own memoir-writing.
Myths and stereotypes surrounding seafarers in the Age of Sail persist to this day. Sailors were celebrated for their courage, strength, and skill, yet condemned for militancy, vice, and fecklessness. As sail gave way to steam, sailing-ship mariners became nostalgic symbols of maritime prowess and heritage, representing a timeless, heroic masculinity in an era when the modernizing industrial world was challenging assumptions about gender, class, work, and society.
Drawing on British seafaring memoirs from the late nineteenth century, Making Men in the Age of Sail argues that maritime writing moulded the reading public’s image of the merchant seaman. Authors chronicled their lives as they grew from boy sailors to trained seafarers, telling colourful tales of the men they worked with –most never doubted that the sailing ship had made them better men. Their testimony reinforced and preserved conservative perspectives on seafaring manhood as Britain’s economic and technological priorities continued to evolve in the new steamship age.
Offering a gender analysis of the image of the seafarer, Making Men in the Age of Sail brings the history of British sailors into wider debates about modernity and masculinity.
Graeme J. Milne is a historian and author. He lives in Liverpool.
SPECIFICATIONS
June 2024
978-0-2280-2130-8
£29.95 paper
978-0-2280-2129-2
£90.00 cloth
6 × 9 272pp
eBook available
Early Modern Naval Health Care in England,
1650–1750
matthew neufeld
Tracing the emergence of organized health care for Royal Navy seamen during the Age of Sail.
From 1650 to 1750 the provision of medical care for injured seamen in the Royal Navy underwent a major transformation, shifting from care provided by civilians in private homes to care at hospitals run by the navy. Early Modern Naval Health Care in England examines the factors responsible for the emergence of centralized naval health care over the course of a century.
In 1650 sick and injured Royal Navy sailors were billeted in homes in coastal communities where civilians were paid to look after them. Care work, which involved making meals and feeding patients, administering medicines, washing clothes and bed linens, and shaving and cutting hair, was essential to the recovery of tens of thousands of seamen – and it was done mostly by women. Beginning at the turn of the eighteenth century, naval health care moved to a more centralized system based in hospitals, where the conduct of sailors and care workers could be overseen. A key factor driving this change was the relationships between naval officials and female civilian caregivers, which were often fraught. Yet even with the shift to naval hospital settings, most care for convalescing sailors continued to be provided by women.
Early Modern Naval Health Care in England shines a light on the care work that lay behind England’s formidable Royal Navy during the Age of Sail.
“This is an impressive and thoughtful history of naval health care in early modern England, built on careful archival research that uncovers a wealth of detail and historical evidence for a key period in English and naval history. Neufeld’s revisionist approach argues for a focus on care, which allows women to come to the forefront of histories usually dominated by men while also allowing for historical sensibility in understanding medicine.”
Erica Charters, University of Oxford and author of Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years’ War
Matthew Neufeld is associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s/AMS Healthcare Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society
March 2024
978-0-2280-2059-2
£26.99 paper
978-0-2280-2058-5
£90.00 cloth
6 × 9 288pp 4 maps
eBook available
Ghost Stories On Writing Biography
judith adamson
The memoir of a literary biographer in twentieth-century Montreal.
A biographer is, in a sense, the ghostwriter of someone else’s life, trying to keep out of the way but inevitably leaving an imprint and being changed in the enterprise. In her memoir Judith Adamson, a professional biographer, tells the ghost’s side of the story.
Adamson reveals the questions she asked herself as she researched and wrote, as well as the personal challenges she faced in producing a lively sense of the figure she was recreating on the page, drawing an unbreakable connection between the personal and the professional. Crossing paths with literary luminaries of the twentieth century, she went on to collaborate with Graham Greene on Reflections, the last of his books published in his lifetime. She recounts how she was entrusted with the publication of Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie’s love letters; how she found a way to hunt down Charlotte Haldane, one of the first women on Fleet Street; and how she came to write the biography of Max Reinhardt, the man behind the finest English publishing house of the mid-twentieth century.
A sharply observant and self-effacing narrator, Adamson brings vividly to life an anglophone upbringing in mid-century Montreal, the London
literary scene, and the struggles faced by the women intellectuals of her time. Ghost Stories is a tale of good luck and the hard sleuthing of biographical work before the digital age.
“Through accounts of her relationships with her biographical subjects – like Graham Greene, Charlotte Haldane, and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons –[Adamson] shows us that the biographer is not merely a stenographer, they transform a story into a narrative.”
Montreal Review of Books
Judith Adamson has written biographies of Graham Greene, Charlotte Haldane, and Max Reinhardt and edited the love letters of Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie. A former English teacher at Dawson College, she lives in Montreal.
SPECIFICATIONS
Footprints Series May 2024
978-0-2280-2103-2
£19.99 paper
5.5 × 8.5 200pp eBook available
To Make a Killing
Arthur Cutten, the Man Who Ruled the Markets
robert stephens
The life and legacy of the legendary Wall Street operator of the Roaring Twenties.
One of the wildest, most spectacular decades in American history, the 1920s were a period of unprecedented growth and mass consumerism. In the New Era people drank in speakeasies, danced to jazz, idolized gangsters, and bet their life savings on stocks.
Born and raised in a small Canadian town, Arthur Cutten went to Chicago in 1890 with ninety dollars to his name. Through utter ruthlessness, he amassed a fortune trading in grain futures and stocks. Cutten was heralded as the modern Midas, and his every move was followed by the masses, who believed they could get rich quick. But everything changed after the crash of 1929. The heroes of prosperity became the villains of the Great Depression. Determined to crack down on the “banksters,” the Roosevelt administration launched an all-out attack on those it blamed for the collapse – and Cutten was at the top of the list. A US Senate committee probed how he manipulated stock prices. The Grain Futures Administration moved to bar him from trading. And the Bureau of Internal Revenue indicted him for income tax evasion. But the wily operator won on every count: he emerged from the Senate investigation unscathed, maintained
his grain trading privileges after a victory in the Supreme Court, and left almost nothing for the tax collectors upon his death.
To Make a Killing tells the tale of Cutten’s journey to fabulous wealth, the forces that propelled him, and the fascinating characters in his life.
“Cutten was once described by his mentor, the commodity trader James Patten, as ‘not only the most daring, but the most unerring speculator the world has ever known.’ Mr. Stephens’s chronicle is a valiant attempt to shed light on his life.”
The Wall Street Journal
Robert Stephens is a former journalist and president of pr post . He lives in Toronto and London, Ontario.
SPECIFICATIONS
February 2024
978-0-2280-2030-1
£27.99 cloth
6 × 9 272pp 60 photos eBook available
Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude
On the Genius of the Mass in B Minor
james crooks
How musical ecstasy inspires profound gratitude.
Every lover of music finds themselves, at privileged moments, in ecstasy – certain that what they are hearing has captured, somehow, an incontrovertible truth. In Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude James Crooks explores this profound aesthetic experience in a case study of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor – widely considered among the greatest works of the western choral canon.
The book begins with an investigation of compositional principles – of what we might call the mass’s musical architecture. Crooks argues that in its cathedral-like structure, Bach gives us a detailed map of the spiritual journey it triggers. This journey culminates in our apprehension of the world as a gift. And that means, in turn, that the mode of knowing appropriate to its musical ecstasy is gratitude. In the gratitude of aesthetic experience, we learn something crucial about the genuine nature of our own identity, our relations with others, and the character of the things around us. Bach’s genius lies in his capacity to frame these lessons in the mass’s choruses, solos, and duets.
Spotlighting the wisdom embedded in gratitude, Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude celebrates music as a pathway to understanding our deepest selves and our intimacy with the world.
“James Crooks finds and creates ways for understanding the immensity of Bach’s compositional achievement, most significantly in the Mass in B Minor, specifically as experienced in the act of performance (for both listener and performer). Readers will find this book refreshing for the sheer enthusiasm of the author, an antidote to the tendency to relativize achievements in canonic works of art.”
John Butt, University of Glasgow
James Crooks is professor of philosophy at Bishop’s University and director emeritus of the Bishop’s University Singers.
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2063-9
£23.99 paper
978-0-2280-2062-2
£95.00 cloth
6 × 9 208pp
eBook available
Hope Circuits
Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing
jessica riddell
Tackling thorny issues facing higher education with a hope-based mindset.
How do we model abundance and generosity – in teaching, in learning, in leading organizations, particularly non-profits – when dealing with fiscal austerity and other forms of scarcity thinking? Hope Circuits explores this question, presenting sophisticated ideas that support democratizing higher education for everybody.
Written in a conversational style that draws upon Jessica Riddell’s experience in governance, senior administration, and scholarship, the book is a how-to guide and thought leadership manifesto for developing the conceptual tools to seek solutions to higher education’s most pressing issues. Hope Circuits aims to rewire mindsets, perspectives, and behaviours to in turn rewire and renew the systems within which university stakeholders learn, live, and work. It tackles this challenging feat by suggesting ten tools to build hope circuits, a concept borrowed from neuroscience.
Riddell acknowledges that changing systems and deep cultures is not for the faint of heart; indeed, the more than 250 interviews conducted with thought partners for Hope Circuits expose how individuals who navigate complex systems regularly experience discomfort and even despair. In response, she shows us how to anchor a practice of hope in higher education with focus and intention, inviting others to adopt and adapt her approach.
“An exceptional book. Riddell’s voice is unmistakably fresh; the integration of many other diverse voices is powerful and seamless. Her work feels like a symphony.”
Nancy Chick, Endeavor Foundation Center for Faculty Development, Rollins College
“Riddell’s framework of hope goes beyond the performative language of decolonizing higher education to offer a plan of action for a new mindset, one prepared to transform our institutions to meet this moment.”
Dawn Michele Whitehead, Office of Global Citizenship for Campus, Community and Careers, American Association of Colleges and Universities
Jessica Riddell is professor of English and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Excellence at Bishop’s University.
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2067-7
£21.99 paper
978-0-2280-2066-0
£90.00 cloth
6 × 9 304pp 7 photos eBook available
Bridestones
miranda
pearson
Elegiac and symbolist, these poems contemplate death, art, desire, and historical trauma.
Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.
The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.
Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.
Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”
Miranda Pearson has written six books of poetry. Her previous collections include Rail and The Fire Extinguisher. She lives between England and Canada.
SPECIFICATIONS
The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series April 2024
978-0-2280-2077-6
£15.99 paper
5 × 7.5 112pp eBook available
Making Sense of Myth
Conversations with Luc Brisson
gerard naddaf with louis-andré dorion
The life and thought of renowned Plato scholar Luc Brisson – in his own words.
To most, myths are merely fantastic stories. But for Luc Brisson, one of the great living Plato scholars, myth is a key factor in what it means to be human – a condition of life for all. Essential and inescapable, myth offers a guide for living, forming the core of belonging and group identity.
In 1999 Quebec classicist Louis-André Dorion published a series of French conversations with Brisson on the idea of myth. In Making Sense of Myth Gerard Naddaf offers an extended and updated English translation of these conversations, as well as a new set of discussions between himself and Brisson. Beginning with his childhood in the village of Saint-Esprit, Quebec, through his education as a gifted child in minor seminaries starting at age eleven, and continuing with his years in Paris, first as a graduate student and later at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Brisson tells the story of his escape from an allencompassing myth – the one promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church. The philosopher situates Quebec society as inseparable from the history of the Catholic Church in Quebec and argues that this correlation offers a perfect paradigm of myth and mythmaking. Naddaf’s introduction and afterword contextualize the conversations by discussing Brisson’s and Plato’s understanding of the origin and meaning of myth, elaborating on the role of myth in anthropogeny, in the creation of selfhood, and in multiculturalism.
Making Sense of Myth promises both a philosophy of myth and a philosophy of life, one inspired by Brisson’s lifelong engagement with the great Western philosopher Plato.
“There is no better introduction to a contemporary reading of Plato and Platonism than these conversations with Luc Brisson, thoughtfully translated, introduced, expanded, post-faced, and copiously annotated by Gerard Naddaf. In these pages you will find an exploration of Brisson’s works and ideas, his search in Plato for the origins of our culture, and his return to the source where science and myth are deeply intertwined.”
Arnaud Macé, University of Franche-Comté
Gerard Naddaf is professor emeritus of philosophy and senior scholar at York University.
Louis-André Dorion is professor of ancient philosophy at the Université de Montréal.
SPECIFICATIONS
May 2024
978-0-2280-2071-4
£27.50 paper
978-0-2280-2070-7
£90.00 cloth
6 × 9 328pp
eBook available
Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy
stephen j.a. ward
A deep and engaging explanation of how evolution and extreme historical events can cause publics to become irrational, intolerant, and antidemocratic.
Across cultures, democracies struggle with intolerant groups, misinformation, social media conspiracies, and extreme populists. Egalitarian cultures cannot always withstand this swing towards the irrational. In Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy Stephen Ward combines history and evolutionary psychology for a comprehensive view of the problem, arguing that social irrationality is likely to occur when social tensions trigger a person’s enemy stance: ancient extreme traits in human nature such as aggressiveness, desire for domination, paranoia of the other, and us-versus-them tribalism. Analyzing eruptions of public irrationality – from apocalyptic medieval crusades and Nazi doctors in extermination camps to suicidal cults – Ward presents his evolutionary theory of public irrationalism, demonstrating that human nature has both extreme Darwinian traits promoting competition and sociable traits of cooperation and empathy. The issue is which set of traits will be activated by the social ecology. Extreme traits, once adaptive when humans were hunter-gatherers, have become maladaptive and dangerous. Catalyzed by intolerant media and demagogues, the swing towards the irrational weakens democracy and may
lead to human extinction through nuclear holocaust. Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy concludes with practical recommendations on what society should do to resist the engines of unreason within and without us.
Stephen J.A. Ward is professor emeritus and Distinguished Lecturer in Ethics at the University of British Columbia and award-winning author and editor of 13 books on ethics and media ethics, including Objectively Engaged Journalism: An Ethic.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2003-5
£29.99 paper
978-0-2280-2002-8
£100.00 cloth
6 × 9 4560pp
eBook available
The Service of Faith
An Ethnography of Mennonites and Development
philip fountain
Confronting the question of religion’s place in development, disaster relief, and peacebuilding.
Founded over a century ago, the Mennonite Central Committee (mcc ) is regarded as one of the most important institutional carriers of Canadian and American Mennonite identity. Generations of Mennonites and others have served with the organization, carrying out development, disaster relief, and peacebuilding work in over fifty countries globally. The Service of Faith offers an ethnography of mcc ’s Christian development work in Indonesia, exploring the challenges, conundrums, theologies, and ethical commitments that shape Mennonite service.
The success of religious-based development work depends on effectively bridging very different cultural and religious worlds. Braiding together extensive ethnographic and archival research, Philip Fountain analyzes mcc ’s practices of cultural translation in the Indonesian context. While the particularities of Mennonite religious values are deeply influential for mcc ’s work, in practice its humanitarian project involves collaboration with a range of actors who come from widely varied religious positions. In taking a nuanced, case-specific approach to understanding how faith shapes moral projects, Fountain challenges mainstream claims to secular neutrality
and the tendency to dismiss or disapprove of religious motivations in development work.
Exploring the diverse ways in which Mennonite convictions permeate mcc ’s work in Indonesia, The Service of Faith confronts the question of whether religion has a legitimate place in international development work.
Philip Fountain is senior lecturer in religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington –Te Herenga Waka.
SPECIFICATIONS
September 2024
978-0-2280-2248-0
£34.00 paper
6 × 9 366pp 7 figures eBook available
West Coast Mission
The Changing Nature of Christianity in Vancouver
ross a. lockhart
An ethnographic profile of Christianity’s identity, meaning, and mission in secular Vancouver.
Vancouver, British Columbia, now reports “no religion” as its leading religious identity, putting it in the vanguard of a trend happening across North America. What does this mean for the Christian communities that continue to worship, work, and witness in this mostly secular city?
West Coast Mission seeks to uncover where Christianity in Vancouver is headed now that it is a minority belief system in the broader culture. Drawing on a five-year study of fourteen sites, including church plants, congregations, and parachurch agencies, Ross Lockhart describes how Christians in Vancouver are organizing their communities, shaping their beliefs, and expressing themselves in mission. He finds that, rather than simply declining, Christianity in the city is adapting in response to immigration, decolonization, pluralism, and social crises. Christians are focusing on friendship and social connection in a culture that identifies as “spiritual not religious,” on affordable housing as a missional concern, on the communal value of environmental stewardship, and on sharing the gospel in light of the destructive legacies of colonialism and residential schools.
West Coast Mission explores the evolving spectrum of religious identity in Vancouver and the significant cultural shifts taking place in how Christian mission and witness are approached in a secular city.
Ross A. Lockhart is dean of St Andrew’s Hall and professor of mission studies at Vancouver School of Theology.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2286-2
£25.99 paper
978-0-2280-2285-5
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 216pp 1 table eBook available
Sanctuary in Pieces
Two Centuries of Flight, Fugitivity, and Resistance in a North American City
laura madokoro
How protection, responsibility, and hospitality have animated the search for refuge and what this means for migrant justice today.
Over the past two decades, the Sanctuary City movement has resulted in hundreds of jurisdictions declaring themselves safe spaces for undocumented migrants and people without status. Although they often draw on historical precedent, public sanctuary efforts amongst settler societies are markedly different from how refuge was conceptualized in the past.
To explore these broad shifts, Sanctuary in Pieces looks at the history of protection and hospitality in Montreal/Mooniyaang/Tiohtià:ke over two hundred years. Laura Madokoro traces the movements and experiences of fugitives from slavery, wanted criminals, internationally renowned anarchists, and war resisters before turning to instances of public sanctuary practices since the 1970s. As people sought and forged refuge, they navigated a web of social connections, political agendas, and economic realities, testing the notion of the city and whom it was for. Even as those in search of sanctuary imagined, and often enacted, possible futures in the city, sanctuary was far from easy: it lay in an underground marked by refusal and denial, selective
compassion and solidarity, and sometimes outright animosity. This contested and tumultuous history offers a profound challenge to the symbolism and substance of contemporary sanctuary city efforts.
Conceptually innovative, Sanctuary in Pieces speaks to activist and policy considerations in the present, the making and unmaking of community, and how historical practice can accommodate silence in studies of intimate experiences of mobility and, on occasion, refuge.
Laura Madokoro is a historian who lives and works in Ottawa on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies
October 2024
978-0-2280-2287-9
£29.99 paper
6 × 9 336pp 9 photos eBook available
Finding Molly Johnson Irish Famine Orphans in Canada
mark g. m c gowan
A revision of the accepted history of Irish orphans’ migration to Canada during the Irish famine.
Ireland’s Great Famine produced Europe’s worst refugee crisis of the nineteenth century. More than 1 5 million people left Ireland, many ending up in Canada. Among the most vulnerable were nearly 1,700 orphaned children who now found themselves destitute in an unfamiliar place. The story Canada likes to tell is that these orphans were adopted by benevolent families and that they readily adapted to their new lives, but this happy ending is mostly a myth.
In Finding Molly Johnson Mark McGowan traces what happened to these children. In the absence of state support, the Catholic and Protestant churches worked together to become the orphans’ principal caregivers. The children were gathered, fed, schooled, and placed in family homes in Saint John, Quebec, Montreal, Bytown, Kingston, and Toronto. Yet most were not considered members of their placement families, but rather sources of cheap labour. Many fled their placements, joining thousands of other Irish refugees on the Canadian frontier searching for work, extended family, and the opportunity to begin a new life.
Finding Molly Johnson revisits an important chapter of the Irish emigrant experience, revealing that the story of Canada’s acceptance of the famine orphans is a product of national myth-making that obscures both the hardship the children endured and the agency they ultimately expressed.
Mark G. McGowan is professor of history at the University of Toronto and principal emeritus of St Michael’s College. His is the author of several books including The Imperial Irish: Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914–1918.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion September 2024
978-0-2280-2300-5
£36.00 paper
978-0-2280-2299-2
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 258pp 19 tables
eBook available
On the Divine Things and Their Revelation
friedrich heinrich jacobi
Translated and with an introduction by Paolo Livieri
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s last comprehensive account concerning God, rationality, existence, and the long shadow of nihilism.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1829) both introduced and epitomized the great philosophical controversies of his age. His influential text Von den göttlichen Dingen und Ihrer Offenbarung aroused the final debate about the intrinsic nihilism of modern philosophy, which, he postulated, ran the risk of becoming a serious threat to human life and intellect.
In the first English translation of this text, On the Divine Things and Their Revelation, Paolo Livieri provides readers with a historical investigation of the debates that preceded and followed Jacobi’s book, as well as a philosophical review of its main topics and arguments. Jacobi’s concluding analysis against systematic philosophy, given at the closing of the era of German idealism, offers an overview of the possibility of connecting the human and the divine according to the metaphysical approach that he develops into theism. This philosophical testament revives the divisive ideas of his first publications and provides new insights into his critique of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, yielding a final evaluation of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental method.
Bringing together Jacobi’s most famous themes – from faith to revelation and nihilism to immediate knowledge – On the Divine Things and Their Revelation expresses his tireless commitment to situating the human being at the centre of reality.
Paolo Livieri is research fellow at the University of Messina.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Philosophy of Religion Series
November 2024
978-0-2280-2278-7
£40.00 paper
978-0-2280-2277-0
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 256pp
eBook available
Deep Disposal A Documentary Account of Burying Nuclear Waste in Canada
william leiss
What shall be done with Canada’s 3.2 million nuclear fuel waste bundles, currently stored on site at nuclear plants?
Canada is one of many countries around the world that use nuclear reactors to generate electrical power, in part to reduce our carbon footprint. Yet this energy produces hazardous, long-lived waste that emits dangerous radioactivity for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear waste, stored temporarily for decades, must be safely disposed of so it will not pose a serious threat to human health and the environment. This means placing it in locations deep underground in granite, sedimentary rock, or clay. Canada’s ideal location is somewhere on the Canadian Shield, the 2 5-billion-year-old crystalline rock that undergirds much of the country. Beginning in 2010 some twenty-two communities, most in Ontario, volunteered to host the repository. In Deep Disposal William Leiss explains the challenges that have arisen in the evaluation of potential sites over the last decade.
High-level nuclear waste is the most hazardous byproduct of an energy source that is incredibly useful and increasingly in demand. Finding the ideal place to store it permanently is an urgent policy crisis facing our country. Deep Disposal reveals the nature of this crisis and how we might overcome it.
William Leiss is professor emeritus in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University and author of several books on climate issues, most recently Canada and Climate Change
Needle Work A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada
jamie jelinski
An original history of those who made tattooing their livelihood.
In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients.
From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career.
Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.
“Joseph ‘Sailor Joe’ Simmons would probably be pissed off that you don’t recognize his name. Canadian-born Simmons hustled his way across North America during the early to mid-twentieth century, showing off his world-record number of tattoos, organizing a ‘Pigmy Village’ exhibition, and marketing his ‘positively painless’ tattooing method to the public while evading the fbi and rcmp . Simmons’s story is just one of the threads woven through Jamie Jelinski’s Needle Work. Wonderfully illustrated, it is the first study devoted entirely to the development of Canada’s rich modern tattooing tradition. Jelinski introduces the reader to a cast of innovators, agitators, and entrepreneurs, drawing from the art, lives, and businesses of these and other tattooists to explore the twentieth-century trajectory of professional tattooing in Canada. A must-have for researchers, students, and tattooists wanting to better understand the history of this line of work.”
Aaron Deter-Wolf, co-editor of Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing
Jamie Jelinski is an interdisciplinary scholar of visual culture. He lives in Montreal.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History June 2024
978-0-2280-2198-8
£67.00 cloth
7 × 10 424pp 153 photos, colour throughout eBook available
Mainstreaming Porn Sexual Integrity and the Law Online
elaine craig
How porn became social media, why algorithms are shaping our sexual culture in harmful ways, and what the law can do about it.
The ubiquity of streaming sites such as Pornhub has transformed the social role of sexually explicit content today. Online porn is no longer a shady corner of the internet; it is mainstream. Its production, commodification, and consumption on data-driven online platforms has changed – and is changing – our personal relationships, social and legal systems, and sexual norms.
Online porn platforms are shaping sexual desires and practices in the same way that Google and Facebook have affected social relationships and the circulation of information: porn is now consumed on data-driven platforms with algorithms designed to engage the attention of users, encourage the production of user-generated videos, and filter content. Through frank examination of mainstream content with themes of incest, intoxication, and so-called consensual rough sex, issues that play out in life and in court, Elaine Craig shows how the platformization of mainstream pornography is shaping our sexual culture in real time. Mainstreaming Porn maps a complicated web of legal culture and legal actors, from corporate lawyers and platform content regulation to the criminal, civil, and administrative contexts in which porn companies operate and the legal interpretation of sexual assault defences.
All have profound implications for the promotion and protection of everyone’s sexual integrity, and especially that of women and girls.
Mainstreaming Porn is an unflinching, carefully balanced perspective on a divisive topic. Without demonizing pornography or its consumption, Craig makes a powerful argument for applying legal mechanisms to corporate-owned online platforms while offering a sober evaluation of the limits of the law in governing pervasive cultural norms and social understandings of sexuality.
“Elaine Craig cuts through the middle of polarizing debates about kink, censorship, and radical feminism to grapple with the shifting terrain of mainstream pornography. She has an amazing ability to distill complexity in her writing, and Mainstreaming Porn will be an influential and widely read book.”
Lise Gotell, University of Alberta
Elaine Craig is professor of law, Dalhousie University, and the author of Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession and Troubling Sex: Towards a Legal Theory of Sexual Integrity.
SPECIFICATIONS
September 2024
978-0-2280-2239-8
£29.99 cloth
6 × 9 392pp
eBook available
The Great Right North
Inside Far-Right Activism in Canada
stéphane leman-langlois, aurélie campana, and samuel tanner
Taking readers inside the black box of the Canadian far-right movement, featuring interviews with leaders and followers.
In February 2021 the Canadian government published a considerably expanded list of domestic terrorist entities. While some, such as Blood and Honour, were already known, others – such as Atomwaffen Division, the Base, the Proud Boys, and the Russian Imperial Movement – emerged from the shadows. Until then many considered far-right groups in Canada a negligible phenomenon, at worst a local police matter.
The Great Right North charts the growth of these groups, illuminating how official and unofficial government attention generates the context in which they build their movements. The result of seven years of research – including social media scraping, analysis of print and video sources, and interviews with scores of leaders and adherents –it examines how far-right organizations operate, recruit, and finance their activities and explores why individuals choose to join. Breaking new ground by revealing the ideological underpinnings and fragmentation within these groups, the authors also highlight the role of digital platforms in their proliferation.
Most politicians have been quiet about the phenomenon of far-right extremism in Canada, insisting it is imported activism financed elsewhere. The Great Right North provides an essen-
tial primer – for journalists, those working in policy institutes and think tanks, and students and scholars – for understanding its vast and urgent homegrown challenges.
“The Great Right North significantly advances our understanding of far-right ideologies and the structural characteristics of extremism. This kind of work is very rare because of the elusive nature of the far-right universe. Anyone seriously interested in comprehending the right side of the political spectrum must read this book.”
Frédéric Boily, University of Alberta
Stéphane Leman-Langlois is professor of criminology at Université Laval.
Aurélie Campana is professor of political science at Université Laval.
Samuel Tanner is professor in the School of Criminology at the Université de Montréal.
SPECIFICATIONS
Carleton Library Series October 2024
978-0-2280-2284-8
£25.99 paper
978-0-2280-2283-1
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 288pp 8 tables, 1 photo eBook available
Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service
donald j. savoie
A timely book on the capacity of the Canadian public service to provide policy advice without fear or favour and to deliver services to Canadians.
The federal public service plays a vital role in Canada’s development by helping to shape public policies and deliver programs and services to Canadians. Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service provides a comprehensive review of the challenges confronting the public service, how the relationship between politicians and career officials has evolved in recent years, and what motivates public servants.
Donald Savoie calls on Canadians and their politicians to consider what they want from their federal public service. Answering this question requires a fresh look at the government’s traditional accountability requirements, how policies are shaped, and how government programs and services are delivered. It also requires a review of ambitious modernization and reform measures launched over the past forty years to make the public service more accommodating to political direction and to improve program delivery. Dividing federal public servants into two groups –poets (those who write policy) and plumbers (those who deliver programs and services) – the book establishes who has the upper hand. This division sheds new light on the theories that seek to explain the attitudes and behaviours of career government officials.
Amid increasingly strong signs that the public service is in need of a reset, Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service concludes with practical recommendations to assist Canadians and their politicians in defining what they want their public service to be.
“Donald Savoie draws on his considerable knowledge about public administration to persuasively argue that there are serious problems with the federal government in Canada regardless of who is in power. Savoie is an excellent, engaging writer and delivers information in a succinct manner. Few scholars so artfully master the skill of communicating with clarity.”
Alex Marland, author of Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada
Donald J. Savoie holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance (Tier 1) at the Université de Moncton. He is the author of numerous books including Canada: Beyond Grudges, Grievances, and Disunity and Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions.
SPECIFICATIONS
September 2024
978-0-2280-2138-4
£34.00 cloth
6 × 9 354pp 1 diagram eBook available
The Lives of Lake Ontario An Environmental History
daniel macfarlane
A history of using and abusing Lake Ontario.
We have changed Lake Ontario – and it has changed us. The Lives of Lake Ontario details the lake’s relationship with the Indigenous nations, settler cultures, and modern countries that have occupied its shores. Lake Ontario has so profoundly influenced the historical evolution of North America that it is arguably the most important, yet most unappreciated, of the Great Lakes.
For centuries Lake Ontario has enabled and enriched the societies that crowded its edges, from fertile agricultural landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities. Daniel Macfarlane examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this resource: through dams and canals, drinking water and sewage, trash and pollution, fish and foreign species, industry and manufacturing, urbanization and infrastructure, population growth and biodiversity loss.
Serving as both bridge and buffer between the two countries, Lake Ontario came to host Canada’s largest megalopolis. Yet its transborder exploitation exacted a tremendous ecological cost, leading people to turn their backs on the lake. In the later twentieth century, innovative regulations such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements partially improved Lake Ontario’s health.
Despite signs that communities are re-engaging with Lake Ontario, it remains the most degraded of the Great Lakes, with new and old problems alike exacerbated by climate change. The Lives of Lake Ontario demonstrates that this lake is both remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable.
“Engaging and accessible, The Lives of Lake Ontario fills gaps in our knowledge of lakefront geographies by considering the lake itself as an organizing principle. This recentring of key regional features generates insights into the economic and environmental history of the region that have been overlooked by land-oriented studies, giving water its due in the history of this watery centre of the continent.”
Jennifer Bonnell, author of Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley
Daniel Macfarlane is associate professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and the author of Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series September 2024
978-0-2280-2223-7
£25.99 cloth
6 × 9 282pp 41 photos eBook available
The Adaptable Country
How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century
alasdair roberts
Adaptability is the overlooked key to Canada’s survival in turbulent times.
Shifting geopolitics, regional conflicts, climate change, and technology shocks: these are just some of the factors that will make the twenty-first century dangerous for Canada. Adaptability, the capacity to anticipate and manage dangers, is essential for the country to survive and thrive. But Canada is not as adaptable as it once was.
In The Adaptable Country Alasdair Roberts explains what this vital ability means and why we are currently falling short. Politicians, he argues, are overloaded and fixated on the next election. Governments no longer launch big projects to think about the future. Leaders have stopped meeting regularly to discuss national priorities. Technological changes have undermined journalism and the ability of citizens to talk civilly about public affairs. The public service has become less agile because of a decades-long buildup of controls and watchdogs. While in many ways Canada is a better country than it was a generation ago, it is also more complex and harder to govern.
The Adaptable Country outlines straightforward reforms to improve adaptability and reminds us about the bigger picture: in a turbulent world, authoritarian rule is a tempting path to security. Canada’s challenge is to show how political systems built to respect diversity and human rights can also respond nimbly to existential threats.
“A lively read, The Adaptable Country explores how governance has evolved in Canada. More approachable and broader in scope than much academic work on Canadian governance and public administration, it draws on key anecdotes to engage and inform a wide general readership.”
Emmett Macfarlane, coauthor of Legislating under the Charter: Parliament, Executive Power, and Rights
“The Adaptable Country offers a unique view of government and governing in Canada. Roberts deftly examines issues related to public administration, political parties, civil society, and political culture to show which parts of our political system are no longer up to the task.”
Brooke Jeffrey, author of Road to Redemption: The Liberal Party of Canada, 2006–2019
Alasdair Roberts is professor of public policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of numerous books, most recently Superstates: Empires of the Twenty-First Century
SPECIFICATIONS
Canadian Essentials September 2024
978-0-2280-2200-8
£21.99 paper
6 × 9 192pp 1 diagram eBook available
Cultural Change among the Algonquin in the Nineteenth Century
leila inksetter
Translated by Bruce Inksetter
A history of Indigenous dynamism in the face of cultural disruption.
The nineteenth century was a time of upheaval for the Algonquin people. As they came into more sustained contact with fur traders, missionaries, settlers, and other outside agents, their ways of life were disrupted and forever changed. Yet the Algonquin were not entirely without control over the cultural change that confronted them in this period. Where the opportunity arose, they adapted by making decisions and choices according to their own interests.
Cultural Change among the Algonquin in the Nineteenth Century traces the history of settlerIndigenous encounter in two areas around the modern Ontario-Quebec border, in the period after colonial incursion but before the full effects of the Indian Act of 1876 were felt. While Lake Timiskaming was the site of commercial logging operations beginning in the 1830s, the Lake Abitibi region had much less contact with outsiders until the early twentieth century. These different timelines permit comparison of social and cultural change among Indigenous peoples of these two regions. Drawing on nineteenthcentury archival sources and twentieth-century ethnographic accounts, Leila Inksetter sheds new light on band formation and governance, the
introduction of elected chiefs, food provisioning, environmental changes, and the interaction between Indigenous spirituality and Catholicism.
Cultural change among the nineteenthcentury Algonquin was experienced not only as an uninvited imposition from outside but as a dynamic response to new circumstances by Indigenous people themselves. Inksetter makes a case for greater recognition of Algonquin agency and decision making in this period before the implementation of the Indian Act.
Leila Inksetter is professor in the Department of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Bruce Inksetter (1938–2023) had a long career as a translator, contributing to several academic publications.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies
September 2024
978-0-2280-2214-5
£45.00 paper
978-0-2280-2213-8
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 504pp 27 photos, 8 tables eBook available
Beothuk
How Story Made a People (Almost) Disappear
christopher patrick aylward
How the Indigenous Beothuk people in Newfoundland were made extinct – through stories.
The well-known story of the Beothuk is that they were an isolated people who, through conflict with Newfoundland settlers and Mi’kmaq, were made extinct in 1829. Narratives about the disappearance of the Beothuk and the reasons for their supposed extinction soon became entrenched in historical accounts and the popular imagination. Beothuk explores how the history of a people has been misrepresented by the stories of outsiders writing to serve their own interests – from Viking sagas to the accounts of European explorers to the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists. Drawing on narrative theory and the philosophy of history, Christopher Aylward lays bare the limitations of the accepted Beothuk story, which perpetuated but could never prove the notion of Beothuk extinction. Only with the integration of Indigenous perspectives, beginning in the 1920s, was this accepted story seriously questioned. With the accumulation of new sources and methods – archaeological evidence, previously unexplored British and French accounts, Mi’kmaq oral history, and the testimonies of Labrador Innu and Beothuk descendants – a new historical reality has emerged.
Rigorous and compelling, Beothuk demonstrates the enduring power of stories to shape our understanding of the past and the impossibility of writing Indigenous history without Indigenous storytellers.
Christopher Patrick Aylward is a filmmaker and associate professor of film studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Reimagining Métis/settler relations through music.
What makes music Métis, and who gets to decide? Complex dynamics of recognition, nonrecognition, and erasure have played out over a history of Métis music-making, from the Red River Resistance all the way to the present day.
Monique Giroux argues that Métis music reflects broader social relationships, in particular the politics of recognition. Drawing on newspaper articles, archival documents, interviews with Métis and non-Métis musicians, and over a decade of research at cultural festivals, she charts a history of reframings: a changing but problematic relationship whereby settlers define the boundaries of acceptance to assert control over Métis identity and culture. Complicating this narrative, Giroux points to the many ways Métis have resisted settler recognition and erasure –both within mainstream old-time fiddling and at Métis-run events where people have continued to gather, tell stories, and draw on music to rebuild relationships in a time of resurgence.
Métis Music critically examines music as a shifting site of encounter, showing its readers what to listen for, how to learn by listening, and the importance of acting intentionally with the learning gained through listening.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies October 2024
978-0-2280-2226-8
£35.00 paper
978-0-2280-2225-1
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 276pp 9 photos, 3 tables eBook available
Monique Giroux holds the Canada Research Chair in Métis Music and is associate professor of music at the University of Lethbridge.
Seized by Uncertainty
The Markets, Media, and Special Interests That Shaped Canada’s Response to COVID-19
kevin quigley, kaitlynne lowe, sarah moore, and brianna wolfe
How Canadian governments at various levels responded to the pandemic: gathering information, setting standards, and changing behaviours.
The covid -19 virus was responsible for the deaths of over thirty-five thousand Canadians in its first two years alone. Described as the biggest public health crisis of the century, it was an uncertain threat, which emerged within complex psychological, social, legal, administrative, and economic contexts.
Seized by Uncertainty explains how Canadian governments responded to that threat. Despite early warning signs, governments failed to appreciate the trade-offs required to respond to the pandemic. Their approach, at times intolerant of debate and ignorant of diversity, served the interests of some over others. Their response prioritized stability and containment, enabling four in ten people to work from home, disproportionately benefiting an educated middle class who profited further from soaring stock markets and housing prices. Mental health issues spiked, racialized people were much more likely to test positive for the virus, those in low-income sectors experienced unstable employment and lacked workplace safety protections, the lives of low-risk youth were in constant suspension, and residents of some care homes were virtually abandoned.
Seized by Uncertainty studies the pandemic response through the contexts in which it emerged, exposing uncomfortable truths about a fragmented society and governance problems that predated the threat.
Kevin Quigley is director of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance and a professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at Dalhousie University.
Kaitlynne Lowe is research assistant at the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University.
Sarah Moore is research assistant at the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University.
Brianna Wolfe is research assistant at the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University.
SPECIFICATIONS
November 2024
978-0-2280-2289-3
£45.00 paper
6 × 9 504pp 26 diagrams, 30 tables eBook available
Without Beginning or End
jacqueline bourque
An extraordinary poetic testament and meditation on mortality in the wake of a cancer diagnosis.
In my palliative months / the cormorant leaves me / at peace, disintegrating / with the exhalation of a Buddha
Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charles Baudelaire, who connects the poet to “the ligatures of life.” Those ligatures in turn connect her with family in the collection’s remarkable title suite, bringing new life to a past that continues to resonate in the present.
Without Beginning or End is a book about love, friendship, art, and the human condition. Beautiful, and poignantly human, it is an emotionally charged parting gift to loved ones and readers alike.
Jacqueline Bourque (1949–2023) was an Ottawa-based poet. Her poems appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, and the Queen’s Quarterly. Her first book is Repointing the Bricks (Mansfield Press, 2021), shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award.
Water Quality
cynthia woodman kerkham
Clear, liquid-voiced poems that shimmer through lakes, oceans, and bloodstreams and ask: What does water want?
I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea’s bright night, / their milky way, unfurling.
In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” It “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” in Hong Kong or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.”
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention.
Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham is the author of Good Holding Ground and with feathers and the co-editor of Poems from Planet Earth. She lives in Victoria, bc .
SPECIFICATIONS
The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series
September 2024
978-0-2280-2261-9
£16.99 paper
5 × 7.5 84pp
eBook available
SPECIFICATIONS
The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series
September 2024
978-0-2280-2297-8
£16.99 paper
5 × 7.5 120pp
eBook available
The Rough Poets
Reading Oil-Worker Poetry
melanie dennis unrau
Celebrating oil-worker poetry as a literary phenomenon, an indictment of extractive culture, and a rallying cry for climate justice.
Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.
The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.
How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life?
Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Banting postdoctoral fellow in geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series October 2024
978-0-2280-2294-7
£29.99 paper
978-0-2280-2293-0
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 240pp 16 photos eBook available
Between Composers
The Letters of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers
edited by brian cherney
An intimate view of two young Canadian composers at a turning point in their relationship and careers.
In the fall of 1959 Norma Beecroft, a twenty-fiveyear-old composition student, left her home in Toronto and travelled to Rome to study with the eminent Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi. She left behind her lover and mentor, the thirty-fouryear-old Harry Somers, by then recognized as one of Canada’s leading young composers. For the next six months they wrote each other almost every day. Their intense and intimate correspondence documents lives lived apart but shared on the page, until the relationship came to an abrupt end.
Selected from the full extant correspondence, these letters show both composers at pivotal moments in their careers, processing music and culture in their respective environments in ways that would remain influential for themselves and to each other. Beyond illuminating a tempestuous love affair, their wide-ranging letters capture the development of Canadian arts and culture of the period. They record observations about significant figures in their circles; the performances, theatre, and art Somers experienced in Toronto; and Beecroft’s attempts to forge a viable compositional approach through contact with important artists and composers abroad. Somers eventually
realized that what he wanted most was for Beecroft to give up her studies and return to Toronto to marry him. She turned him down and remained in Italy to study and write music, cementing her commitment to the vocation that would shape the rest of her creative life. She would break ground as a woman in her field, a producer for the cbc , and a composer and early champion of electroacoustic music.
A window into cultural life in Canada and Rome at the end of the 1950s, Between Composers is a striking record of a turning point in the lives and careers of two young artists that would mark them and their music for decades.
Brian Cherney is a composer and professor of music at McGill University.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2274-9
£45.00 cloth
6 × 9 336pp 8 photos eBook available
Poetics of the Paranormal
kevin chabot
A haunted history of media that explores the shifting representation of ghosts across photography, film, television, and the internet.
The appearance of ghosts in art and popular culture has transformed throughout history. From the undead corpse of the medieval tradition to the transparent forms of photographic film, to the infrared and thermal images that now populate reality television, the paranormal has literally changed shape over the centuries.
In Poetics of the Paranormal Kevin Chabot articulates the idea of spectrality, demonstrating how the paranormal is far from a stable, metaphysical category: it is a dynamic and historically contingent discourse, the contours of which shift over time. Specific media, Chabot argues, present the ghost in distinct ways that emphasize the ghostly qualities of the medium and, conversely, the technological qualities of the ghost. Through detailed analyses of nineteenth-century spirit photography, horror films, ghost-hunting reality television, and the viral internet phenomenon Slender Man, Chabot shows how the paranormal both shapes and is shaped by media.
Exploring key historical shifts in contemporary media while providing a rich and novel theoretical framework, Poetics of the Paranormal addresses with renewed rigour the relationships between media, perception, temporality, and the elusive concept of the evidential.
Kevin Chabot is a sshrc postdoctoral research fellow in English at Dalhousie University.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2298-5
£27.99 paper
978-0-2280-2273-2
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 248pp 18 photos eBook available
Shakespeare and the World of Slings & Arrows
Poetic Faith in a Postmodern Age
gary kuchar
An inspired analysis of the television series Slings & Arrows and what it can tell us about the status of Shakespeare in the world today.
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 times even hostile.
In Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows” Gary Kuchar situates the three-season series in its cultural and intellectual contexts. More than a roman à clef about Canada’s Stratford Festival, he shows, it is a privileged window onto major debates within Shakespeare studies and a drama that raises vital questions about the role of the arts in society. Kuchar reads the television show – ever fluctuating between faith and doubt in the power of drama – as an allegory of Peter Brook’s widely renowned account of modern theatre, The Empty Space, mirroring Brook’s distinction between holy theatre, a quasi-sacred vocation, and deadly theatre, a momentary entertainment.
Combining contextualized interpretations of the series with subtle formalist readings, Kuchar explains how Slings & Arrows participates in a broader recuperation of humanist approaches to
Shakespeare in contemporary scholarship. The result is a demonstration of how and why Shakespeare continues to provide not just entertainment, but equipment for living.
Gary Kuchar is professor of English at the University of Victoria.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2281-7
$39.95T CDN, $39.95T US paper
6 × 9 256pp
eBook available
Forced Migration in/to Canada
From Colonization to Refugee Resettlement
edited by christina r. clark-kazak
Foreword by Jennifer Hyndman
Offering students, practitioners, researchers, and journalists an insightful overview of historical and contemporary human displacement, both within and to Canada.
Forced migration shaped the creation of Canada as a settler state and is a defining feature of our contemporary national and global contexts. Many people in Canada have direct or indirect experiences of refugee resettlement and protection, trafficking, and environmental displacement.
Offering a comprehensive resource in the growing field of migration studies, Forced Migration in/to Canada is a critical primer from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Researchers, practitioners, and knowledge keepers draw on documentary evidence and analysis to foreground lived experiences of displacement and migration policies at the municipal, provincial, territorial, and federal levels. From the earliest instances of Indigenous displacement and settler colonialism, through Black enslavement, to statelessness, trafficking, and climate migration in today’s world, contributors show how migration, as a human phenomenon, is differentially shaped by intersecting identities and structures. Particularly novel are the specific insights into disability, race, class, social age, and gender identity.
Situating Canada within broader international trends, norms, and structures – both today and historically – Forced Migration in/to Canada provides the tools we need to evaluate information we encounter in the news and from government officials, colleagues, and non-governmental organizations. It also proposes new areas for enquiry, discussion, research, advocacy, and action.
Christina R. Clark-Kazak is professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, co-editor of Documenting Displacement: Questioning Methodological Boundaries in Forced Migration Research, and author of Recounting Migration: Political Narratives of Congolese Young People in Uganda.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies November 2024
Giving Local Governments in Canada the Power They Need
edited by alexandra flynn, richard albert, and nathalie des rosiers
Foreword by Alan Broadbent
Empowering Canadian cities with the legal authority to manage their own obligations is a crucial democratic project.
Canada’s largest cities have faced exponential growth, with the trajectory rising further still. Due to their high density, cities are the primary sites for opportunities in economic prosperity, green innovation, and cultural activity, and also for critical challenges in homelessness and extreme poverty, air pollution, Indigenousmunicipal relationship-building, racial injustice, and transportation gridlock. While city governments are at the forefront of mitigating the challenges of urban life, they are given insufficient power to effectively attend to public needs.
Cities and the Constitution confronts the misalignment between the importance of municipalities and their constitutional status. While our Constitution is often considered a living document, Canada has one of the most complicated amending formulas in the world, making change very difficult. Cities are thus constitutionally vulnerable to unilateral provincial action and reliant on other levels of government for funding. Could municipal power be reimagined without disrupting the existing constitutional structure, or could the Constitution be reformed to designate cities a
distinct tier of government? Among other novel proposals, this groundbreaking volume explores the idea of recognizing municipalities in provincial constitutions.
The first volume of a complementary pair, authored by renowned Canadian legal and urban studies scholars, Cities and the Constitution suggests contemporary solutions to one of our most pressing policy dilemmas.
Alexandra Flynn is associate professor in the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.
Richard Albert is William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, professor of government, and director of constitutional studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Nathalie Des Rosiers is a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Studies in Urban Governance October 2024
978-0-2280-2207-7
£36.00 paper
6 × 9 300pp 3 tables eBook available
The Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Cities
Where the Law Went Wrong and How We Can Fix It
edited by alexandra flynn, richard albert, and nathalie des rosiers
Foreword by Don
Iveson
What lessons can we draw from other federal systems to improve the constitutional and legal design of Canadian municipalities?
In 1861, just a few years before Confederation, 84 per cent of Canadians lived in rural areas; today, it’s less than 20 per cent. Our municipal governments are asked to do more for their citizens than ever before, yet they must confront myriad challenges – from the public health pandemic to the housing crisis – without the tools they need. They have no constitutional protection from jurisdictional overstepping by provincial governments and no assurance that they will be able to complete any effort they undertake.
The Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Cities explores the historical functions of municipalities, their current ability to tackle major problems, and what the future holds for shifting legal and political powers. This volume examines how preConfederation cities came to have their current constitutional and legislative forms; uncovers how current local governments make decisions within existing legal parameters, highlighting Indigenous-municipal relationships and emergency management; and, finally, looks to the world to investigate future innovation in municipal governance.
The Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Cities makes the case that constitutional concepts must be repurposed to support the transition from nation-building to city-building in a global context.
Alexandra Flynn is associate professor in the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.
Richard Albert is William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, professor of government, and director of constitutional studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Nathalie Des Rosiers is a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Studies in Urban Governance October 2024
978-0-2280-2232-9
£36.00 paper
6 × 9 330pp 19 figures, 18 tables eBook available
Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies
Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity
natalie kononenko
A look into the lives of Ukrainian Canadians on the Prairies and their expressions of identity through rituals and celebrations.
While Canada is home to one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world, little is known about the life and culture of Ukrainians living in the country’s rural areas and their impact on Canadian traditions.
Drawing on more than ten years of interviews and fieldwork, Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies describes the culture of Ukrainian Canadians living in the Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Despite powerful pressure to assimilate, these Ukrainians have managed both to preserve their sense of themselves as Ukrainian and to develop a culture sensitive to the realities of Prairie life, creating their own uniquely Ukrainian Canadian traditions. The Ukrainian church, an iconic though now rapidly disappearing feature of the Prairie landscape, takes centre stage as an instrument for the retention of Ukrainian identity and the development of a new culture. Natalie Kononenko explores the cultural elements of Ukrainian Canadian ritual practice, with an emphasis on family traditions surrounding marriage, birth, death, and religious holidays. Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies gives voice to a group of everyday people who are too often overlooked, highlighting their accomplishments and their contributions to Canadian life.
“Snapshots of a still-evolving culture, within the churches and beyond them.”
Saskatoon Star Phoenix
Natalie Kononenko is Kule Chair Emerita at the University of Alberta. She lives in Waterloo, on .
SPECIFICATIONS
September 2024
978-0-2280-2193-3
£29.99 paper
6 x 9 336pp 79 photos, 2 maps, 2 tables, colour insert eBook available
Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada
Majesty, Ritual, and Rhetoric
colin m. coates
How the pomp and politics of the Sun King’s regime travelled across the Atlantic.
In Louis XIV’s New France, colonial authorities attempted to reproduce French regal authority in novel ways, often by performing typical metropolitan political rituals. When these practices were transposed into the St Lawrence Valley settlements, where a small French population lived alongside a substantial Indigenous presence, they took on new meanings.
The colony of Canada replicated many features of the developing French absolutist state. Yet while the king likely knew more about his colony than he did about most parts of metropolitan France, this transatlantic setting imposed new constraints on absolutist authority, from the challenges of distance to an Indigenous population that largely lived outside European norms. Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada examines royal power as it was represented in ritual (ceremonial entrances, Te Deums, processions), in rhetoric (political disputes over cabals and factions), and in objects (portraits, royal busts, currency, buildings, maps, and censuses). Colin Coates describes the successes and failures the French authorities experienced in exporting their political practices. He reveals how those authorities’ understandings of Indigenous political culture shaped ideas of the proper relation between rulers and the ruled.
This book traces the establishment of a colonial political culture that continued to shape the lives of the French in Canada long after the Sun King’s death in 1715
Colin M. Coates is professor of Canadian studies and history at York University and author of The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s French Atlantic World Series September 2024
978-0-2280-2236-7
£36.00 paper
978-0-2280-2235-0
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 336pp 25 figures, 5 tables eBook available
With a Unity of Purpose
How the First World War Changed Newfoundland
michael r. westcott
How Newfoundland and Labrador’s support for the war effort reforged the relationship between citizens and the state.
In 1914, the Dominion of Newfoundland found itself at war in defence of the British Empire. On the home front, the war effort reshaped the relationship between citizens and the state, moving from a classical liberalism that emphasized individual rights to a social liberalism that prioritized the rights of the community.
The First World War was felt keenly in Newfoundland – in economic hardship, fears of foreign invasion, and anxieties over the fate of loved ones. When the government insisted that all military-aged men owed a duty to enlist with the Newfoundland Regiment, and as it increasingly depended on women’s domestic work, citizens expected that their service would be rewarded through measures to ensure security and equality on the home front. There was widespread public support for a range of government interventions, including food rationing and price control, prohibition of the sale of alcohol, higher taxes, initiatives to protect against German spies, and military conscription if necessary. By the end of the war, support for women’s suffrage had also grown substantially, in acknowledgment of their major
contribution to the war effort.
With a Unity of Purpose is the first book to examine how wartime Newfoundland and Labrador began to be remade in the image of social liberalism, in which citizens and the state recognized not only their individual rights but their responsibilities to each other.
Michael R. Westcott lives in Conception Bay South, nl .
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2258-9
$39.95A CDN, $39.95A US paper 6 × 9 276pp 5 photos eBook available
Created in the Image?
Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction
or rogovin
An analysis of how Israeli literature and culture imagine the executioners of the Shoah.
The turn of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a brand of fiction that centres the experience and perspective of the perpetrator, thereby humanizing this character and granting it the capability to evoke our empathy. The vast scholarship published on this phenomenon, however, fails to consider Israeli writing, and with it some of the most complex characterizations of Holocaust perpetrators, imagined from the unparalleled position of a nation that was shaped from its very birth by the legacy of Holocaust victimhood and survival.
In Created in the Image? Or Rogovin situates Israeli literary responses to the Holocaust in the canon of perpetrator fiction for the first time. Since the state’s establishment in 1948, perpetrator characterization in Israeli fiction has demonstrated a remarkable development that corresponds to changing circumstances, from the Eichmann trial to the First Intifada. While early examples depicted perpetrators stereotypically and minimally – as seen in Ka-Tzetnik’s demonic and bestial Nazis in Salamandra and in the amorphous persecutor figures in Aharon Appelfeld’s stories – since the mid-1980s these characters have been created in the human image, as nuanced and
multidimensional individuals. The turning point came with Herr Neigel, the sensitive and selfcontradictory commandant in David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), followed by likewise multifaceted and humanized perpetrators in fiction by A.B. Yehoshua, Savyon Liebrecht, and Amir Gutfreund.
Anchored in theoretical and comparative perspectives, Created in the Image? presents a groundbreaking analysis of the poetic mechanisms, moral implications, and historical contexts of this paradigm shift in the Israeli literary response to the Shoah.
Or Rogovin is Silbermann Family Associate Professor in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Bucknell University.
SPECIFICATIONS
McGill-Queen’s Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Series August 2024
978-0-2280-2210-7
£67.00 cloth
6 × 9 282pp eBook available
Of Lost Cities
The Maghribī Poetic Imagination
nizar f. hermes
Addressing the poetic configuration of the lost city in the neglected elegiac and nostalgic poetry of premodern and precolonial Maghrib.
The poetic memorialization of the Maghribī city illuminates the ways in which exilic Maghribī poets constructed idealized images of their native cities from the ninth to nineteenth centuries ce
The first work of its kind in English, Of Lost Cities explores the poetics and politics of elegiac and nostalgic representations of the Maghribī city and sheds light on the ingeniously indigenous and indigenously ingenious manipulation of the classical Arabic subgenres of city elegy and nostalgia for one’s homeland. Often overlooked, these poems – distinctively Maghribī, both classical and vernacular, and written in Arabic and Tamazight – deserve wider recognition in the broader tradition and canon of classical and post-classical Arabic poetry. Alongside close readings of Maghribī poets such as Ibn Rashīq, Ibn Sharaf, al-Ḥuṣrī alḌarīr, Ibn Ḥammād al-Ṣanhājī, Ibn Khamīs, Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī, al-Tuhāmī Amghār, and Ibn al-Shāhid, Nizar Hermes provides a comparative analysis using Western theories of place, memory, and nostalgia.
Containing the first translations into English of many poetic gems of premodern and precolonial Maghribī poetry, Of Lost Cities reveals the enduring power of poetry in capturing the essence of lost cities and the complex interplay of loss, remembrance, and longing.
Nizar F. Hermes is associate professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies at the University of Virginia.
SPECIFICATIONS
November 2024
978-0-2280-2229-9
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 258pp
eBook available
The Poetics of Translation A Thinking Structure
geneviève robichaud
An analysis of experimental uses of translation in contemporary literature.
Translation is a vital method of not just reading but writing and forms the basis of an exciting range of critical, artistic, and literary opportunities.
Combining close readings of literary texts alongside astute critical observations from works by Avital Ronell and Walter Benjamin, amongst others, The Poetics of Translation re-examines key translation studies concepts, challenging our sometimes pragmatic understanding of translation and asking what it is that the discipline can make visible. By highlighting the possibilities of translation as an art form in contemporary innovative writing practices, Geneviève Robichaud reveals translation’s creative and critical potential, arguing that even those literary works that are not exactly translations gain in being apprehended as such. The Poetics of Translation values oblique, even unfinished sources of meaning, dwelling in the speculative spaces of texts and drawing attention to translation as poiesis, as creating that which is tangible and valuable.
Situated at the juncture of translation poetics and literary studies, the book celebrates the uncertainty of translation, the plasticity of language and ideas, and the desire to interpret rather than reiterate.
SPECIFICATIONS
July 2024
978-0-2280-2195-7
£40.00 paper
978-0-2280-2194-0
£85.00 cloth
6 × 9 204pp
eBook available
Geneviève Robichaud is an independent scholar. She lives in Sackville, nb .
Lordship and State Transformation
Bohemia and the Habsburg Fiscal-Financial-Military Regime, 1650–1710
stephan sander-faes
Documenting early modern state building at the regional and local levels.
Although state transformation – continuous struggle and bargaining between rulers and their subjects, producing an unpredictable variety of political structures – is often overlooked, the process is crucial in assessing the organizational development of early modern composite monarchies and deserves further investigation.
In Austria, the monarchy’s emergence as a great power required it to overcome several successive crises that culminated in the decades around 1700. The Habsburgs succeeded more by adjusting relations between Crown and lordships than through institution building. This unusual interaction of state and non-state actors resulted in an Austria that markedly deviated from the centralizing nation-state exemplified by Britain or France. The nascent Habsburg fiscal-financialmilitary regime transformed regional and local authority, leading to armed conflict and causing disintegration of the local administrative and social fabric. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, power – whether local or central, social or political – would undergo enormous changes.
Grounded in extensive research into Czech archives and spanning an era from the Thirty Years’ War to the coronation of Charles VI,
Lordship and State Transformation delves into the complex transitions that characterized the first instance of a balance of power in Europe, with a focus on its underresearched great power, the Habsburg monarchy.
Stephan Sander-Faes is associate professor of early modern history at the University of Bergen.
SPECIFICATIONS
December 2024
978-0-2280-2290-9
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 472pp 17 tables
eBook available, open access
The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec
lisa m. gasbarrone
A fresh look at Quebec’s early novels through the unlikely lens of the sacred.
Quebec’s early novels are full of sacred themes and motifs – devotional objects and practices, parables and scripture, priests and nuns, transcendence, divinity, and eternity. Yet the critical gaze of the past fifty years has seldom engaged the idea of the sacred in a sustained way. Indeed the presence of the sacred has alienated modern and postmodern readers who ignore or downplay its significance, leading to misguided assessments of these works as mediocre and even unreadable for contemporary audiences.
The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec reexamines seven classic novels at the foundations of Quebec’s national literature: Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle (1846), P.-J.-O. Chauveau’s Charles Guérin (1853), Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard (1874), Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens (1863), Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun (1884), Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1916), and FélixAntoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur (1937). Through chapters that focus on sacred themes, character analysis, narrative temporalities, and the hermeneutics of the sacred, Lisa Gasbarrone demonstrates that these novels are more nuanced and innovative than their reputation has allowed.
The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec reintroduces readers to classic works of French-Canadian literature that ironically and provocatively cast their quarrel with modernity in that essentially modern form: the novel.
Lisa M. Gasbarrone is professor of French at Franklin & Marshall College.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2245-9
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 304pp eBook available
Reckoning with History Essays on Uses of the Past
edited by k.j. kesselring and matthew neufeld
New perspectives on how people have put the past to work.
Bringing together essays on uses of history as both a practical activity and an approach to thinking about the present, this collection explores ways in which people have reckoned with history in pasts both distant and near.
Reckoning with History begins by examining uses of the past in early modern Britain, a period in which print, religious reformation, and political conflict transformed historical culture. Later essays offer insights into personal, popular, professional, and sometimes deeply political uses of the past in other times and places, helping to contextualize our own moments in historical writing and to link the early and postmodern periods. Throughout, contributors respond to the writings of Daniel Woolf, whose scholarship illuminates the history of the historical discipline and the social circulation of the past.
Covering subjects such as early archival practices, memories of historic plagues, and the type of commemorations needed to revitalize liberal democracies, Reckoning with History contextualizes the uses of the past today.
K.J. Kesselring is professor of history at Dalhousie University.
Matthew Neufeld is associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
SPECIFICATIONS
September 2024
978-0-2280-2242-8
£99.00 cloth
6 × 9 272pp 3 drawings
Repenser l’Acadie dans le monde
Études comparées, études transnationales
sous la direction de clint bruce et gregory
m.w. kennedy
L’évolution et la persévérance d’une petite société contemporaine à l’échelle mondiale.
Petite société francophone concentrée dans le Canada atlantique, l’Acadie renvoie tout autant à une multiplicité de réalités socioculturelles, depuis l’ère de la colonisation en Mi’kmaki jusqu’aux grandes mutations contemporaines liées à la mondialisation. Du « Grand Dérangement » en 1755 est née une diaspora, parsemée aux quatre coins du monde atlantique, de la Louisiane à la France en passant par les Antilles. Depuis lors, l’Acadie ne cesse d’évoluer tout en se renouvelant.
Repenser l’Acadie dans le monde met en lumière la relève en études acadiennes. En abordant l’Acadie comme terrain d’enquête parmi d’autres et en relation avec d’autres, cet ouvrage collectif repose sur un double pari : celui de la comparaison et celui des approches transnationales qui consistent à saisir le fait acadien dans ses interactions avec d’autres pays, peuples et institutions. Qui parle pour l’Acadie? Le Grand Dérangement a-t-il vraiment institué une rupture sans appel? Y a-t-il convergence ou divergence entre les objectifs formulés aux différentes échelles de l’Acadie et de sa diaspora? Ces questions révélatrices sont explorées sous l’éclairage de plusieurs disciplines.
En ébranlant les idées reçues et les paradigmes établis, cet ouvrage présente une perspective indispensable pour comprendre la francophonie, et surtout le dynamisme, la persévérance et la diversité du peuple acadien.
Clint Bruce est titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en études acadiennes et transnationales à l’Université Sainte-Anne en Nouvelle-Écosse. Gregory M.W. Kennedy est doyen de la faculté des arts à l’Université de Brandon au Manitoba.
SPECIFICATIONS
Rethinking Canada in the World December 2024
978-0-2280-2270-1
£45.00 paper
6 × 9 552pp 51 photos, 3 tables eBook available
À
quoi sert la philanthropie
Explorer l’univers des fondations canadiennes
hilary m. pearson
Traduit par George Tombs
Préface de Jean-Marc Fontan
Un regard d’initiée sur les fondations privées permettant de mieux comprendre le rôle qu’elles jouent dans le Canada d’aujourd’hui.
Pour la plupart des Canadiens et Canadiennes, le monde de la philanthropie et des fondations privées demeure mystérieux. Parfois comparées de façon mémorable à des girafes, les fondations sont des créatures qui ne devraient pas exister. Pourtant, elles existent bel et bien, et elles sont même entourées d’une aura mystique.
Dans À quoi sert la philanthropie? Hilary Pearson démystifie le monde de la philanthropie canadienne en dressant un portrait du paysage actuel des fondations et en mettant en lumière des organisations qui agissent avec détermination face à certains des défis sociaux et économiques les plus pressants de notre époque : les changements climatiques, l’avenir des villes, l’éducation et l’évolution de la main-d’œuvre, le logement et le besoin urgent de réparer et d’établir de nouvelles relations avec les peuples autochtones. Mme Pearson, qui a travaillé pendant deux décennies auprès des dirigeants de fondations à travers le Canada, nous offre un regard intime sur la façon dont ces organisations continuent d’évoluer. Par le biais d’entretiens personnels effectués auprès de la direction de fondations privées – grandes ou petites, établies de longue date ou nouvellement créées – elle décrit les stratégies et les efforts déployés par des fondations canadiennes pour rassembler les parties prenantes de la société, faire le plaidoyer de causes importantes, servir comme intermédiaires ou créer des partenariats.
À une époque marquée par des divisions sociales et des inégalités croissantes, À quoi sert la philanthropie? constitue une contribution opportune au débat actuel sur la légitimité de la philanthropie organisée. Mme Pearson défend avec conviction le rôle primordial joué par la philanthropie privée pour relever les défis d’une époque en pleine mutation.
Hilary M. Pearson est l’ancienne présidente de Fondations philanthropiques Canada et Membre de l’Ordre du Canada.
SPECIFICATIONS
October 2024
978-0-2280-2288-6
£27.99 paper
6 × 9 232pp 2 figures, 2 tables eBook available
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author/editor index
Albert, Richard / 48, 49
Adamson, Judith / 19
Aylward, Christopher Patrick / 39
Bourque, Jacqueline / 42
Bowering, Marilyn/12
Broadbent, Alan / 48, 49
Bruce, Clint / 59
Campana, Aurélie / 34
Cavell, Richard / 6
Chabot, Kevin / 45
Cherney, Brian / 44
Clark-Kazak, Christina R. / 47
Coates, Colin M. / 51
Cooper, Jane / 10
Craig, Elaine / 33
Crooks, Jamie / 21
Des Rosiers, Nathalie / 48, 49
Dorion, Louis-André / 24
Flynn, Alexandra / 48, 49
Fountain, Philip / 26
title index
À quoi sert la philanthropie / 59
Adaptable Country, The / 37
Bach’s Architecture of Gratitude / 21
Beothuk / 39 Between Composers / 44
Bridestones / 23
Cities and the Constitution / 48
Created in the Image? / 53
Fox, Michael Allen / 15
Gager, Duncan / 5
Gasbarrone, Lisa / 57
Germond, Basil / 14
Girard, Patrick / 16
Giroux, Monique / 40
Gossen, Rhonda / 9
Grandpierron, Matthieu / 13
Hermes, Nizar F. / 54
Inksetter, Leila / 38
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich / 30
Jelinski, Jamie / 32
Kennedy, Gregory M.W. / 59
Kesselring, K.J. / 58
King, Steven / 04
Kononenko, Natalie / 50
Kuchar, Gary / 46
Leiss, William / 31
Leman-Langlois Stéphane / 34
Livieri, Paolo / 30
Cultural Change among the Algonquin in the Nineteenth Century / 38
Deep Disposal / 31
Early Modern Naval Health Care in England, 1650–1750 / 18
Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter, The / 6 Fate and Life / 15
Finding Molly Johnson / 29
Forced Migration in/to Canada / 47
Fraudulent Lives / 4
Ghost Stories / 19
Great Right North, The / 34
Hope Circuits / 22
Hour of Absinthe, The / 2
Irrational Publics and the Fate of Democracy / 25
Lockhart, Ross / 27
Lowe, Kaitlynne / 41
Macfarlane, Daniel / 36
MacLaren, I.S / 11
Madokoro, Laura / 28
McGowan, Mark G. / 29
Milne, Graeme J. / 17
Moore, Sarah / 41
Naddaf, Gerard / 24
Neufeld, Matthew / 18, 58
Pearson, Hilary M. / 59
Pearson, Miranda / 23
Quigley, Kevin / 41
Riddell, Jessica /22
Roberts, Alasdair /37
Robichaud, Geneviève /55
Rogovin, Or / 53
Sanders-Faes, Stephan Karl / 56
Savoie, Donald J. / 35
Schwartzwald, Robert / 8
It’s Nation Time / 7
Lives of Lake Ontario, The / 36
Logic in the Wild / 16
Lordship and State Transformation / 56
Mainstreaming Porn / 33
Making Men in the Age of Sail / 17
Making Sense of Myth / 24
Métis Music / 40
More Richly in Earth / 12
Needle Work / 32
Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War / 13
Of Lost Cities / 54
On the Divine Things and Their Revelation / 30 Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Cities, The / 49
Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America / 11
Poetics of the Paranormal / 45
Poetics of Translation, The / 55
Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada / 51 Prisoners’ Bodies / 3
Reckoning with History / 58
Repenser l’Acadie dans le monde / 59
Simon, Sherry / 08
Stephens, Robert / 20
Studer, Nina S. / 2
Tanner, Samuel / 34
Unrau, Melanie Dennis / 43
Wall, Oisín / 3
Rough Poets, The / 43
Sanctuary in Pieces / 28
Seapower in the Post-modern World / 14
Seized by Uncertainty / 41
Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec, The / 57 Service of Faith, The / 26
Shakespeare and the World of Slings & Arrows / 46
Slow Train to Arcadia / 5
Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service / 35
To Make a Killing / 20
Twelfth of February, The / 9
Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies / 50
Water Quality / 42
West Coast Mission / 27
What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy / 10
