University of Guelph

Post-Doc, History

SSHRC Post-doctoral Fellow

About

I am interested in the intersections between environment and public memory in historical studies: how people have responded to ecological change over time, the kinds of meanings they have attached to these changes, and the way memory functions to shape the perception of past landscapes and human actions within them.

My doctoral dissertation, completed in the spring of 2010, explores such interactions as they play out in Toronto's Don River Valley in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It investigates human interventions on the river, their consequences (intended and otherwise) and the reciprocal responses to such interventions by the river itself. As the city developed, I argue, "waste" spaces such as the valley provided important economic, ecological and social services that facilitated urbanization. From its early role as a provider of lumber, clay, and water power for the growing town of York (later Toronto), the river valley increasingly took on peripheral functions as a sink for urban wastes and a repository for “human undesirables.” Squatters, hoboes, and Roma travellers are among the many groups that sought refuge in the valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There they found not only respite from authorities, but also a place that provided the means for limited subsistence: water, sources of wood and plant materials for shelters, cast-away items from abandoned dump sites in the valley, and in some cases, fish and other sources of food. In addition to these social and economic functions, the valley also provided important ecological services as a corridor for wildlife, a drainage basin for neighbouring table lands, and a habitat—however compromised—for aquatic species, birds and other wildlife pushed to the edges of the expanding city. The choice of the valley as a location for summer cottages and “back-to-the-land” enthusiasts in the same period, and its place in mid-twentieth-century urban conservation movements, also receive treatment.

My current research picks up upon this interest in the persistence of what we typically think of as "rural" activities--cottaging, farming, gathering--in the neglected or undeveloped spaces of the urban landscape in twentieth-century Canada and the United States. I am currently exploring these themes in a study of the history of bee-keeping as a “traditional” economy that existed alongside and in relationship with urban industrial norms.

Exploring the geo-spatial expressions of these historical developments, and the ways that historical geographic information systems (HGIS) in particular can enrich our understandings of past landscapes, is another aspect of my work. In my research on the Don Valley, collaboration with the University of Toronto Data and Map Library and financial support from the Network in Canadian History in Environment resulted in the Don Valley Historical Mapping Project.  I am currently co-editing a collection on HGIS in Canada, scheduled for publication in 2012 as part of the Canadian History & Environment series (a joint initiative of NiCHE and the University of Calgary Press).