Congratulations to M. Max Hamon! He just received the 2019 Wilson Book Prize for his first book The Audacity of His Enterprise: Louis Riel and the Métis Nation That Canada Never Was, 1840–1875, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in early 2020.

Media outlets cite Professor Andrea Tone’s research on the history and medicinal use of Lysol to dispel US President Trump’s recent suggestion that injecting or ingesting disinfectants can fight the coronavirus. In response to the president’s remarks, the manufacturer of Lysol issued a press statement, warning consumers to restrict their use of the popular disinfectant to inanimate and exterior surfaces.

Professor and Departmental Chair Jason M. Opal and his father, Prof. Steven M. Opal (Alpert Medical School at Brown) have co-written op-ed for the LA Times on how American Presidents have dealt with epidemics or even triggered them in the past. The op-ed locates the current office holder in a larger historical context of leadership in times of crisis.

Yaroslav Gouzenko has won the Undergraduate Essay Prize of the Canadian Association of Slavists for his paper “Shaimiev and the Tatarstan Model: A Successful Highjack,” which he wrote in Professor Kristy Ironside’s class on Russia in the 1990s (HIST406). The prize is open to students in all disciplines related to Eastern Europe across Canada.

Congratulations!

With the retirement of Connie DiGiuseppe in late 2019 as Area Manager for Student Affairs, the administrative centre of History and Classical Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and Jewish Studies says a farewell to a superb and beloved administrator. In her 31 years at McGill, Connie DiGiuseppe worked for the Faculty of Engineering, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Student Affairs Area, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Anthropology, and eventually for the administrative centre of four departments.

Three finalists for the 2019 Cundill History Prize were announced last night at an event at Massey College, Toronto. The finalists, all female, are UCL Professor of German History, Mary Fulbrook, Harvard Professor and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, and Julia Lovell, Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College at the University of London. These three extraordinary authors approach difficult subjects, opening sometimes uncomfortable conversations around the past to help us better understand their repercussions today.

Congratulations to Prof. Kristy Ironside, who was recently been awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and a grant of the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Societé et culture. The grants will help Prof. Ironside to start her new research project International Copyright Law in the Political Economy of Russia and the Soviet Union.