Tag: World University Service of Canada

MITACS Accelerate Project: the Lebanese Special Measures Program (1975-1990) and The Life of Lewis Perinbam (1925-2008)

by Elizabeth Reid

*Featured image: Lewis Perinbam, 1987 (Source: Unknown photographer/LAC e999919839-u).

Public history is about taking history beyond the traditional academic setting and applying it to real-world challenges. It is history that is aimed at being accessible to the public. This is exactly what Anna Kozlova, a PhD Candidate at the Department of History at Carleton University, has been doing over the past several months in her MITACS-funded research project “Two case studies in the public history of international development policies in Canada: the Lebanese Special Measures Program (1975-1990) and The Life of Lewis Perinbam (1925-2008)”.

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Taking Inventory of WUSC’s Past – A Basement Journey

by Elizabeth Reid

In the Winter of 2020, I had the opportunity to work with the communications department at the World University Service of Canada, or WUSC, to help sort through decades worth of documents, photos, and other forms of media stored in its Ottawa office. Shortly after the First World War, WUSC, under its original name, European Student Relief, was created in Switzerland to help support European students displaced by the war. Although the archives I had the chance inventory did not span all the period back to the 1920s, they helped to paint a picture of the work WUSC has done in the last several decades, and the aid they have been able to provide to students on an international level. While most of WUSC’s archives are held in an off-site storage facility, a small portion of them are still stored in their main office and needed to be inventoried.

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Announcing MITACS Accelerate Project

by Helen Kennedy

As everyone’s inboxes and newsfeeds are flooded with announcements of cancellations and postponements of all things academic and otherwise, it is nice to have the opportunity to announce the start of something.

The Canadian Network on Humanitarian History and Carleton University’s Department of History have partnered with five Canadian NGOs to conduct historically grounded work relevant to each organization.  With matching funding provided by a MITACS Accelerate grant, Dr. Dominique Marshall and Helen Kennedy (PhD candidate) are aiming to demonstrate how micro-histories of individual organizations can be used to address global humanitarian challenges and effectively contribute to the future of humanitarian networks.

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