What is your favourite part about being a professor?
The obvious answer is watching students get excited about the world of ideas, about thinking. But the truth is, we’re living through a period with so many pressures on students, especially economic pressures, that this can be hard to do. How do you create the space to think when you’re worried about student debt and whether your expensive education will pay off in terms of a job? Increasingly, we’re all asked, students and professors alike, to measure the value of what we do in terms of the market. As my students know, I’m all for the practical skills a history degree can provide, but we need to push back against the metrics of the market to make room for luxuries like thinking. Principal Deane recently called this “the wish to find out.”
If there was one piece of advice you could give your students, what would it be?
Take up space. Stand your ground. I say this thinking about the queer and Indigenous students who live in Chown Hall, some of whom are in my first-year course. They’ve been under siege in their own residence, harassed by cowardly haters. It started last fall, but my students tell me it’s ongoing. I’m thinking of the female students whose experiences are captured in the recent study that found Queen’s has the second highest rate of reported sexual harassment in Ontario universities. Given the historical problem of under-reporting, a high report rate is probably not a bad thing but look at what’s being reported. The administration needs to do more. We faculty need to do more. And students who are subject to various kinds of violence and harassment need to band together, make the links. What do you do when you’re under attack? Act up, fight back!
Who is a person in history that you would like to be friends with and why?
Most of my students can likely guess the answer to this question: Michel Foucault. For most of his life, Foucault spent each morning at the Bibliothèque nationale de France doing archival research; during the day he taught lectures and seminars at the Collège de France; in the evenings he organized or attended political meetings to support prisoners, immigrants, and dissidents; at night, he went out to leather bars and gay bathhouses. Nice work if you can get it. Even though he’s dead, I don’t really think of Foucault as a person in history. So I choose Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was a nineteenth-century British homosexual, socialist, feminist, and anti-imperialist. He made the links. Plus, he was a vegetarian and wore groovy sandals.
What’s your favourite and least favourite historical fiction movie/TV show?
Right now, I’d say my favourite on tv is a toss-up between “Peaky Blinders” (that music, the fog, the gin) and “Gentleman Jack,” with Suranne Jones as the cross-dressing, woman-loving Anne Lister. Being a lesbian of the land-owning class has never looked so good. My least favourite is probably “The Vampire Diaries,” a pretty much awful show my vampire-loving partner made me watch. Silver lining: the Hybrids, those who were part vampire and part werewolf, gave me for a few years the analogy I needed to teach about the hybrid character of merchant capitalism in Canadian history. “The Vampire Diaries” is over, so what can I use for a pop culture analogy now? Send me your ideas!
Astrology was a big part of history, so what is your star sign?
Cancer. The crab. Tough and demanding on the outside, receptive and caring on the inside.