UPEI hosts 18th Atlantic Canada Studies Conference April 30 to May 2
The University of Prince Edward Island's Department of History will host the 18th Atlantic Canada Studies Conference (ACSC) from Thursday, April 30, to Sunday, May 3, in McDougall Hall.
Held every two years since the 1970s, the ACSC has gained a prominent place within Canada's scholarly landscape. Although physically grounded in the region, the ACSC pursues universal themes and spans a variety of disciplines, including History, Canadian Studies, Economics, English, Folklore and Environmental Studies. In the process, it brings together university researchers, public history practitioners, policy-makers, volunteers and students.
'Regional boundaries, like regional identities, are tantalizingly imprecise,' says UPEI history professor Edward MacDonald, chair of the conference organizing committee. 'Through its conference theme, ‘Unpacking' Atlantic Canada, this year's conference confronts the very notion of region, both internally, in terms of themes and issues that define our past, and externally, by examining the fluid boundaries of that thing we call ‘Atlantic Canada.''
The diversity of approaches and disciplines in this year's program encourages fresh insights into the nature of Atlantic Canada and its relationship with other regions within and beyond Canada, says MacDonald, including those borderlands where physical, cultural, and economic boundaries tend to blur. In the process, 'region' reaches out to the global, and 'local' conjures the universal.
During the conference, over 75 papers will be given by presenters from across Canada. In addition, it will feature a special panel on the career of Dr. Margaret Conrad, Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at the University of New Brunswick (UNB). Conrad is retiring after a distinguished career as a Canadian historian and a staunch advocate of the Atlantic region as an important field of study.
On Saturday, May 2, Conrad will officially launch a digitized collection of important letters from the Public Archives and Records Office of P.E.I. at the conference banquet at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. This collection is part of a larger initiative at UNB called the Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives. In this project, important archival collections from each Atlantic province have been digitized, making them available online to researchers.
Among the letters that have been digitized, transcribed and annotated for the virtual archives are some written between Captain John MacDonald who brought over 200 Highland Catholic settlers to his estate around Tracadie, P.E.I., in 1772, and his sister Nelly, who supervised the estate during his extended absence from P.E.I. The letters give researchers a rare glimpse of a woman in a position of authority during this period in Island history.
Delegates will also have the opportunity to tour the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation's new exhibition, 40 Years and Counting: Celebrating the Provincial Collection, now on display at the Centre's Art Gallery, before the banquet.
For more information and registration, please contact Sharon Currie at the Department of History, at (902) 566-0493, or visit http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Acadiensis/ACSC.htm.
Photo: Dr. Sharon Myers, Dr. Edward MacDonald and Dr. Lisa Chilton, of the UPEI history department, look over the program for the 18th Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, which will be held at UPEI from Thursday, April 30, to Sunday, May 3.
