Meggie Macdonald

“After the Fall:  Sex, Gender and Power” Graduate History Symposium, University of Toronto, 9-10 February 2007

The University of Toronto Graduate History Symposium, entitled “After the Fall: Sex, Gender, and Power”, has released its program for February 9th to 10th, 2007. Under discussant, Barbara Todd, I will be presenting my paper on Virtus among gladiators to a group composed of two Laurier students and a student from Harvard. The session is “Macho, Macho Man” and looks to be an engaging look at masculinity across the ages. The paper titles seem to encompass a great many things, and I’ll be particularly interested to hear Phyllis Thompson Reid’s paper on the masculinization of professional cooking.

New Frontiers Graduate Conference in History, York University, Toronto, 15-17 February 2007

The New Frontiers conference was almost completely different than the UofT conference a week earlier, and yet there are the obvious connections – there were still nervous students, still some very interesting paper topics, and still some that could have been stellar but structure or presentation took away from it.

York’s conference was much more relaxed, partly because I knew some of the participants, and the atmosphere was much more amicable – the laughing and joking was less forced. I give credit to Alban Bargain for that, a first year PhD student at York researching twentieth century German emigrations, who shuffled a bunch of his friends down to pub and invited me along. This, on the first evening of the conference, made the situation much less immediate or tense, as several graduate students from all disciplines got together around a pitcher to argue about anything.

My presentation was much less solid or well-organized than at UofT, but apparently I did not do as badly as I sounded. There were several other papers and topics I found intriguing – Karen Macfarlane’s work on eighteenth century foreigner juries in Britain, Lee Slinger’s paper on Queen Elizabeth I and her image during the age of PM Walpole, and Jared Secord’s work on the self-mutilation of Origen, a second century CE Christian theologian.

Any information on the conference itself can be found at the New Frontiers conference website. My paper, entitled “The Amphitheatre Sublime, or How I Stopped Worrying and Love Russell Crowe”, can be viewed here.

Of the two conferences I attended this year during my Masters degree – the “After the Fall” Graduate History Symposium at the University of Toronto, and the New Frontiers Graduate History Conference at York University – I believe, in retrospect, that I enjoyed the UofT Conference much more. However, this is only because New Frontiers fell on the last weekend of York’s Reading Week and I had several assignments that had deadlines coming up quickly.

The two conferences were almost perfectly juxtaposed to one another: structure versus flexibility. UofT’s conference organizers were incredibly astute, planning in advance for every contigency that came up. York, again partly because as a volunteer at the registration desk I saw more of the behind-the-scenes panic, seemed more haphazard.

And yet, at York I found myself listening for euphony in the presenters’ scholarly vocabulary but not actually listening to what they were saying, at least not without effort. I think the fact that both conferences were based in History departments and not in Classics made the subject matter less accessible for me. York also demonstrated a general and undirected enthusiasm for history.

UofT was clearly much more a case of a recognized need for social networking and elements of career ambitions. UofT was also much more eclectic – there were not as many participants and so the sessions had to accomodate people over subject matter. York’s conference planners seemed to have no problem with the eclectic nature of their conference and was able to avoid resistence to it, for example by having a moderator instead of a discussant.

And yet, I was much more impressed with UofT’s conference. There was a degree of professionalism there that I was expecting and was not disappointed by. It was what I was expecting a conference would be like, even though I had hoped it would be more scholarly than it was (due to the varied subject matter). Because the surprise was not in the structure of the conference but in the lack of serious scholarly discussion, I have something to look forward to when planning my next conference application.

It was a very obvious stepping stone at UofT, whereas York felt more like required participation because of my affiliation there. Perhaps that can sum up, to a very basic extent, how my Masters degree will measure up to the BA (honours) that I received from the University of Toronto.