Meggie Macdonald

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.