September 23, 2005 Source: Mount Allison University: http://www.mta.ca/news/index.cgi?id=815 ‘Moments of Truth’: Women Becoming Historians in Canada — lecture to be held Sept. 27 SACKVILLE, NB — One of Canada’s most distinguished historians and a true pioneer in her field, Dr. Alison Prentice, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, will give the Canadian Studies Visiting Scholar Public Lecture at the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University campus on September 27 at 7 p.m. Her talk is entitled: ‘Moments of Truth’: Women Becoming Historians in Canada. Dr. Prentice has had a long and prolific career as a scholar in Canadian women’s history. She taught at York University, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the University of Victoria, and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Throughout her career, Dr. Prentice has also been very active in the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Committee on Women’s History. She was founding chair of the Ontario Women’s History Network, and is currently secretary of the Women’s History Network of BC. Specializing first in the history of 19th century education, her focus is now on gender and the teaching profession and the history of women and higher education in Canada. Her immense contributions to the discipline include many pioneering publications on Canadian women. Amongst her early pioneering publications, she authored, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada (1977); and co-authored Canadian Women: A History (1998), the first general survey text on women’s historic experience in Canada — spanning from native women’s history in the early contact period to the contemporary Canadian feminist movement. In recent years, Dr. Prentice has been researching and writing on the history of Canadian faculty wives, as well as women in the history and science professions in Canada with a particular focus on women becoming professional physicists and historians. Her forthcoming publications include important contributions to: The Canadian Professoriate edited by Lisa Panyotides and Paul Stortz; Learning to Practise: Contexts and Focus, edited by Ruby Heap, R.D. Gidney, and Wyn Millar; Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, edited by Mary Spongberg, Barabara Caine, and Ann Curthoys; and a special issue of Scienta Canadiensis on Canadian women in Science and Engineering. Other significant widely-read publications of which Dr. Prentice was a co-editor include: Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work (1999); Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (1997); Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching (1991). Faculty from the departments of history and physics and the women’s studies program are co-sponsoring Dr. Prentice’s visit with the support of the Centre for Canadian Studies. —30— For further information please contact Dr. Andrew Nurse, Centre for Canadian Studies, Mount Allison University, tel: 364-2350 (anurse@mta.ca). | 