Research in the Department of History

Dr. Simon Devereaux

My research explores the interplay amongst material, political and social-cultural forces in the history of capital punishment in London from 1689 until 1837, the last decades in which execution was imposed for (many!) crimes other than murder. All major western nations during this era executed people for crimes against property as well as crimes of violence. But no single jurisdiction executed so many people as were hanged in London – more than 2,800 from 1730 to 1837.

I’ve recently completed the most detailed and time-consuming part of this research: a database of the 9,481 people who were sentenced to death at London’s Old Bailey courthouse between 1730 and 1837, derived from a review of more than 1,300 volumes and boxes of documents in a dozen different archives.  The database is supplemented with extensive analytical text explaining its many searchable criteria, including the fifty different crimes of which these people were convicted. Digitized under the expert supervision of Stewart Arneil at the Humanities Computing and Media Centre, this project is now partnered with the world-famous research sites Old Bailey Online and Digital Panopticon. I hope to eventually add the data for 1689 through 1729 as well, after further work in the London Metropolitan Archives.

While getting this done, I also published four journal articles drawing upon the core statistical data, as well as two book chapters treating the cultural history of criminal trial in Georgian and Victorian England. I’m currently editing for publication the diaries of Horace Cotton, the Ordinary (chaplain) of Newgate Prison from 1816 to 1838. Cotton’s diaries – which were kept against the wilshes of his official employers – provide unusually vivid glimpses of the psychological state, during their last days on earth, of the 150 convicts who were hanged on his watch.

I’m also working towards completion of a monograph on all of this. Once that’s done, I hope to get back to an even larger, longstanding project: a detailed study of the role of criminal justice in the expanding powers of the English state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I’m also tempted to spend some time working on crime and punishment in eighteenth-century Cornwall, a part of England which hanged hardly anyone at all. That would make a nice change!

Dr. Lynne Marks

I have explored the relationships between religion, gender and class for much of my research career. My first book, Revivals and Roller Rinks:  Religion, Leisure and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (University of Toronto Press, 1996), compared women’s active relationship with the churches with men’s more ambiguous one in the churchgoing culture of late 19^th century Ontario. I then turned my attention to late nineteenth and early twentieth century British Columbia, where I found it was much more possible to reject churchgoing entirely, and glory in being labeled an “infidel” than was true in Ontario.  In Infidels and the Damn Churches:  Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia (UBC Pess, 2017) I focused particular attention on the atheist working-class white men of the province, and the class, gender and often racist reasons that explained their irreligion.

In my two current projects I remain fascinated by questions of religion and irreligion, but have moved much closer to the present day. The first project, which is part of the SSHRC-funded Cascadia project (led by UVic’s Dr. Paul Bramadat), studies the development of the particularly secular culture in the Pacific Northwest (both in Canada and the US). I am interviewing both Canadian and American individuals whose families have been irreligious in this region for several generations, tracing changes and continuities in the reasons for their secularism, and the ways it is received by the communities around them. I argue that long-term irreligion among these families helps to explain the Pacific Northwest’s particularly secular culture today. I have also interviewed those who have been part of Christian families in the region for generations, examining changes in how the larger community views people of faith in an increasingly secular culture.

My other project (a SSHRC-funded project with Dr. Margaret Little of Queen’s and Dr. Sarah Nickel of the University of Saskatchewan) focuses on second wave feminism (from the late 1960s to the 1980s), exploring how activist low income, immigrant, racialized and Indigenous women had quite different perspectives on questions of religion, family and motherhood from those of mainstream white feminists, and how these differences increased divisions and created tensions among activist women. With the Humanities Faculty Fellowship I will hold in the spring of 2019 I will be focusing in particular on the impact of the unspoken but very powerful secular views of most white mainstream feminists on other activist women.  I will also be exploring how the secularism of mainstream feminists may have contributed to the broader secularization of late twentieth century Canadian society.

Dr. Penny Bryden

My research interests revolve around power—who has it, who wants it, and how they stock it. While I generally study Canada, there are lots of connections with other parts of the world in my work.  In the past, I’ve looked at how particular policies have emerged out of internal party power struggles and out of intergovernmental battles. I have been especially interested in the emergence of social policies in the 1960s (which I wrote about in Planners and Politicians: Liberal Politics and Social Policy, 1957-1968) and the evolution of economic and constitutional policies (which, combined with social policies, were the focus of ‘A Justifiable Obsession’: Ontario’s Relations with Ottawa).  Policies take on more of a backseat role in my forthcoming book, Canada: A Political Biography, which looks at the people – both well known and obscure – who have shaped the political environment since the 19^th century.  And I have recently turned my attention toward the institutions where power resides, and the scandals that have resulted when people have gone a step too far in their use of power.  The first project, a book-length analysis of the origins and evolution of the Prime Minister’s Office in Canada, naturally led me to the second project on political scandal in Canada.  As we have seen recently with the Mike Duffy trial and the revelations about what was going on in Stephen Harper’s PMO, the office and the idea of scandal are intertwined.  This project uses the framework scandal as a way of understanding the way political culture has changed.  As a starting point, I am trying to identify all the political scandals in Canada since Confederation.  All those people who think that Canadian history is boring will be surprised that the list is already several hundred scandals long, and growing every day!

Dr. Serhy Yekelchyk

Being a specialist on Ukraine can seriously disrupt the measured pace of one’s research program, and this is exactly what happened to me in the last two years. The Euromaidan Revolution of 2013–14, followed by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and the military conflict near the Russian-Ukrainian border, meant that I not only gave a great many media interviews, but also put on hold one research project in order to write a book on the current conflict. I had finished researching a monograph about the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–20, a fascinating period with so many parallels to more recent events in this region (imperial collapse, ambivalent national identities, Russian aggression), but instead dedicated my time while on Study Leave to write a short book, The Conflict in Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2015). Appearing in Oxford’s book series, “What Everyone Needs to Know,” it discusses the present-day conflict in its proper historical and cultural context. The book argues that this conflict has not been about language or ethnic identity, but rather about political models: a democratic, European one versus an authoritarian Russian one. Building on this project, in December 2015 I organized an international workshop at UVic on “Eastern and Southern Ukraine in Peace and War,” which sought to answer the question of why the war started in the Donbas and not in other predominantly Russian-speaking regions in the Ukrainian east and south. I am now in the early stages of collecting materials for another monograph-length project, this one on the special history of political protest in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv from 1905 to 2015.

Dr. Jordan Stanger-Ross

I am currently the Director of Landscapes of Injustice a research partnership project that is devoted to telling the history of the dispossession of the property (homes, businesses, farms, fishing vessels, automobiles, and any and all personal belongings) of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s. In 1942, when over 22,000 Japanese Canadians were uprooted from coastal British Columbia after Canada’s declaration of war with Japan, the Canadian government passed a law indicating that their property would be protected for the duration of the conflict and then released back to them. A year later, the government commenced selling all of it. Japanese Canadians, 75% of whom were Canadian citizens, suffered severe individual material losses; neighbourhoods and communities built by generations of hard work were destroyed. Landscapes of Injustice is a collaboration of academics, museums, and community organizations that is now working together to unearth this history, to understand its legacies, and to communicate it to audiences in Canada and beyond. You can learn more about our project at landscapesofinjustice.com.

Dr. Jason Colby

My new research explores the shifting relationship between orcas and people as a window into the changing environmental politics of the Pacific Northwest.  Drawing upon archival, oral, and field research, my project focuses on the debate over orca capture in the 1960 and 1970s in British Columbia and Washington State.  I am especially interested in the dynamics of business, regional identity, and cultural change in the transborder region now known as the “Salish Sea.”  In addition to analyzing the impact of killer whale capture on the region, my research underscores the need for historical perspective and international cooperation on environmental issues that affect residents on both sides of the border, including industrial pollution, maritime traffic, and the debate over the Northern Gateway Pipeline.  With the decline of the Salish Sea orcas and the salmon runs on which they depend, the region's Canadian and American residents must grasp their shared history in order to save their shared environment.  Funded by a five-year SSHRC grant, my project offers opportunities for undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

UNBC talk

Dr. Rachel Cleves

My new research examines the pursuit of pleasure within expatriate communities in western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am studying how expatriates combined indulgence in transgressive sexualities with the enjoyment of good food, plentiful alcohol, and harder drugs. I am particularly interested in the construction of communities of pleasure that challenge conventional assumptions about the organization of communities around shared nationality or sexual identity. From Paris to Capri, from cassoulet to cocaine, from lesbianism to open marriages, I am mapping the networks that bound together these quintessential outsiders.

Dr. Cleves new book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America was published by Oxford University Press in April 2014.

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research traces the women's lives in sharp detail. The story of Charity and Sylvia overturns today's conventional wisdom that same-sex marriage is a modern innovation, and reveals that early America was both more diverse and more accommodating than modern society imagines.