SpokenWeb / Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling / Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network Present
The launch of three new titles and a talk by Dr. Jeffrey Weingarten
Monday, 11 November 2019
12pm – 2pm
“The Sun Room” LB 1019 (10th floor of Library Building, Concordia’s Downtown Campus), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.
Launching:
A SPECIAL ISSUE ON ORAL HISTORY OF QUEBEC HERITAGE, edited by Rod MacLeod. Contributors include Lea Kabiljo; Piyusha Chatterjee; Cassandra Marsillo; José Alavez; Sébastien Caquard; Lilyane Rachédi; Steven High; Alicia Aroche; Aiden Hodgins; Pharo Sok.
Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, eds., THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK ON MEMORY AND PLACE (London: Routledge, 2019), with COHDS contributors: Luis Sotelo Castro, Sébastien Caquard, Emory Shaw, José Alavez, Stefanie Dimitrovas, Lachlan MacKinnon, Lilia Topouzova, and Ceri Morgan.
And a talk by:
Jeffrey Weingarten, SHARING THE PAST: THE REINVENTION OF HISTORY IN CANADIAN POETRY SINCE 1960 (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
The history of social history as a field is curious, to say the least. When the field emerged in the 1960s, institutional historians promised it would bring new stories to take readers away from the elite writing of academics and closer to the everyday experiences of people. Yet, the academy’s continued emphasis on professional distance and objectivity made it difficult for historians to connect with the experiences of those about whom they wrote, and those same emphases made it all but impossible for non-academic experts to be institutionally recognized as historians. Poets, however, faced no such barriers. Indifferent to and distrusting of academic convention, poets were arguably the voice of social history after 1960. In many ways, their work still embodies the essence of social history as it was first imagined: a democratized space in which the right to speak of the past authoritatively is shared.
Dr. Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten is a Professor of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College and the author of Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry since 1960 (UTP 2019). He has published over three dozen reviews, articles, and conference presentations, and he is currently completing work on two new books: Ad Astra: The Selected Letters of John Newlove and The Promise of Paradise: The Library in Public and in Private (co-edited with Jason Camlot).