Fields of study: War and Society, 21st Century Canada
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Cindy Brown
Education: BA Hons. History (Trent)

Thesis title: “Media Coverage of Canada in Afghanistan, 2001-2011”

My thesis examines media coverage of Canada’s involvement in the War in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2011. Specifically, it asks how the media portrayal of the war shaped Canadians’ perception of their nation’s involvement, and whether the depictions of the war in mainstream media were accurate.

What were Canadian civilians shown and told about the war in Afghanistan, and how did these narratives shape their beliefs? Were these narratives true or false? Why did the media present information in the way that it did, and what purpose or agenda did it serve?

• Co-editor, with P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “It is Necessary that they Should Understand that they are Under the Law”: The Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uloqsaq, 1917 (Frost Research Centre, 2023)
  
  
• Co-editor, with P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Canada’s First Eastern Arctic Patrol, 1922: First Person Perspectives (Mulroney Institute on Government, 2022)
  
  
• “Tainted Love: Gendering Illicit Sex in Early Modern Europe,” The Mirror vol. 42, no. 1 (2022): 119-133

Fields of study: Oral History, Public History, Digital History, Atlantic Canadian History
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Cindy Brown
Education: BA Linguistics (MUN ’21), Dipl. Human Services (NBCC ’16)

Project description: “THE CONGREGATION & Research-Based Documentary Filmmaking” project doubles as Catherine’s master’s thesis as she embraces the role of academic researcher, film producer and editor.

This project explores the landscape of creating ‘public-facing history’ by blending elements of oral history, archival research, and the process of producing a historical research-based documentary film.

This academic research explores the uses, criticisms, and limitations of public-facing and oral-history since their emergence as fields in the discipline of history as they apply to research-based filmmaking in Atlantic Canada.

Catherine exemplifies the usefulness of film as a primary resource by examining footage captured in 2003 and 2023 of the annual Wood Island Reformed Baptist Church service to explore elements of collective identity and community formation/retention alongside oral history testimony.

The final of this research is a reflective element that examines the topography of filmmaking at the graduate-student level by establishing a route into creative-project-based research.

Fields of study: Modern Germany, Nazism, Communism in Germany
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Lisa Todd
Education: BA Hons. History (Brandon U)

Working thesis title: “Red Flags Divided: The Communist Party of Germany’s Struggle for Socialism under the Weimar Republic”

My research explores the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) members’, particularly women’s, responses to the KPD’s stance on combating Nazism.

While Stalin’s Comintern leadership doubtlessly influenced the party, how much was “social fascism” policy rigidly enforced from above, and how much did the party’s rank and file support it?

Moreover, to what degree was there cooperation on the ground between members of the KPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and other Left factions despite Stalinization?

Through my research, I hope to gain a better understanding of the less-amplified voices within the KPD.

Fields of study: Atlantic Canadian History, Food History, Women’s History
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisors: Dr. Sean Kennedy (UNBF) and Dr. Erin Morton (StFX)
Education: BA Hons (StFX)

Working thesis title: “‘As Much Sugar As You Think Proper’: Recipes and Colonial Constructions in Early Halifax”

My master’s thesis project analyzes several dozen Loyalist recipes, dated 1780-1902, from the Nova Scotia Archives to map Loyalist family histories of colonial exchange through food in the Atlantic World.

My source base is largely composed of recipes created by the multi-generational women, buttressed by records exploring their family finances.

By examining the ways which the families gained and spent their fortunes, I explore how recipes connected British settlers in Halifax to the larger British Atlantic World.

Fields of study: Atlantic World History, Social History, Economic History
Campus: Saint John
Supervisors: Dr. Erin Spinney, Dr. Bonnie Huskins
Education: Cert. Disability Management (Dal ’14), BA Bioarcheology (MUN ’18), MA Atlantic Canada Studies (Saint Mary’s ’22)

Dissertation title: “Invisible Economies: The Makeshift Markets of South Shore Nova Scotian Settlements, 1750-1815”

My research explores the makeshift economy in long-eighteenth-century Nova Scotia and how it shifted to accommodate changing demands and societal constraints. I examine economic catalysts, inhibitors, and community implications of a changing economy, exploring underrepresented markets, and the people within them.

This study will focus on historical settlements in Lunenburg, Liverpool, and Shelburne, Nova Scotia. Though the economy of makeshifts is often described as the economy of the poor, destitute, and marginalized, my research defines it as: “an economy of diversified resources” whose market is less visible in the historic record.

Those who worked within that economy may have had multiple sources of income and adopted a variety of survival techniques such as physical migration and occupational changes, supplemental incomes, and criminal and non-criminal activity.

By validating the contributions of those individuals to these communities and their economies, we can reframe the narrative to be one of importance.

Fields of study: Atlantic World History, Early Modern and Medieval Europe, Western Religions and Belief Systems
Campus: Saint John
Supervisors: Dr. Cheryl Fury and Dr. Bonnie Huskins
Education: BA History (Vancouver Island University ’20), MA History (Dal ’22)

Working dissertation title: “Pirates and their Pastors: The Role of Execution Sermons in the Atlantic World, 1690-1730”

My research explores how religion, belief, and piety influenced peoples’ internal and external worlds throughout the Anglo-Atlantic World in relation to piracy.

I principally work with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirate execution sermon accounts in the British Isles and Atlantic colonies to examine how people interpreted piracy through a literary framework.

Religious leaders across the western world published Biblical discourses in conjunction with pirate execution spectacles to spread moralism, which developed into its own distinct genre purposed to rival earlier depictions of pirates as English patriots.

My work analyzes ministers’ moralistic crusades to demonize piracy through their brand of popular media and examines how these accounts affected public opinion.

Publications:

• “Blue Light Evangelicals in the Late Eighteenth-Century Royal Navy,” “Waldensians,” “Methodism (Wesleyanism)”, “Puritans,” and “Moriscos,” in The Database of Religious History (2024).
  
  
• Book review of Frances Barkley, Eighteenth-century Seafarer by Cathy Converse, in The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord 33, nos. 3 and 4 (June 2024): 499-501.

Fields of study: Black Loyalist History, Black Atlantic History
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Education: BSc (St. Mary’s), MScEng (UNB), MA History (UNB)

Working dissertation title: “‘To Be Made Majesties Of...:’ Black Loyalist Agency in the Maritime Provinces”

This study examines Black Loyalist society by investigating vital statistics, church records, and oral histories to demonstrate the diversity of Black Loyalist society rather than viewing them as a cultural monolith.

I argue that Black Loyalism, the settlement in Sierra Leone, and the No. 2 Construction Battalion reflect a spectrum of Black Loyalist aspirations, from high concepts of loyalty to Britain to more practical motives of avoiding imprisonment.

Preliminary oral histories reveal internal rifts and a hierarchy of colorism within Black communities, as exemplified by racially mixed Barbadian Stephen Blucke’s leadership in Birchtown.

Understanding these dynamics sheds light on the mobility of Black Loyalists and the rise and fall of their communities within broader White society.

Fields of study: Imperial History, War and Society, Modern Germany
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Lisa Todd
Education: BA Hons. Psychology and Classics (U of Winnipeg ’21), MA History (UNB ’23)

Working dissertation title: “Defending Germany: Right-Wing Political Violence in an Imposed Decolonial Space, 1919-1925”

My project examines the street violence that occurred during the early years of the Weimar Republic between right-wing, pro-imperial militia groups like the Freikorps and left-wing, anti-imperial groups.

Using memoirs, police reports, newspapers, and military files, it analyses the motivations of officers and lower ranked militia personnel who were most often responsible for inflicting the political, racial, and gendered violence of the day.

My study contextualizes the violence of this period in Germany’s colonial past and the collapse of its colonial empire at the end of the First World War, as well as global trends of anti-left activity and anti-Bolshevik fear across the British Empire in places like Canada, Australia, and Ireland.

Publications:

• “Pandora’s Box: The Legacy of Iraq in Ukraine,” Intersections 5, no. 2 (2022): 21.

Fields of study: First World War, Canadian History, History of Medicine
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Lee Windsor
Education: BA (McGill), BEd (Queen’s), MA (RMC)

Dissertation title: “Public Health Science Innovations and Their Application Within the Sanitary Operations of the Canadian Army Medical Corps During the Great War, 1914-1919”

The Great War along the Western Front and in Russia saw a substantial decline in the percentage of fatalities due to disease.

My research focuses on the disease-control units (Sanitary Sections and Mobile Laboratories) that were mobilized as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force beginning in 1915 as well as for the Canadian contingents deployed to Russia in 1918-19.

These units were the military end-product of over fifty years of scientific discovery and innovation in the microbial origin and spread of disease. By 1914 innovations in public health were fully incorporated within the Canadian Army’s operational doctrine.

The study will focus on the operational tasks assigned to these units along the Western Front as well as within the Army’s hospitals, barracks and billets. These tasks included, but were not limited to, the construction and organization of water purification and septic systems as well as decontamination and quarantine measures.

Publications:

• Book Review of Among the Walking Wounded: Soldiers, Survival and PTSD by John Conrad, in Canadian Military History 32, no. 1 (2023).
  
  
• “Making Waves; Remembering Prime Minister Kim Campbell’s Lonely Losing Battle to Replace the Sea Kings,” Canadian Naval Review 14, No 3 (2019).

Fields of study: Atlantic World History, Public History, Indigenous History, Material Culture
Campus: Saint John
Supervisors: Dr. Erin Spinney (UNBSJ) & Dr. Erin Morton (StFX)
Education: BA Folklore and English (MUN), MA Folklore (MUN)

Working dissertation title: “Examining Canada’s Influence on Nineteenth-Century International Exhibitions: Atlantic Connections at the Crystal Palace in 1851”

Publications:

• “Archive,” Edward Elgar Encyclopedia of Historical Organization Studies [forthcoming Oct 2025].
  
  
• “Letters home written by Private Innes F. Munro,” Intersections 7, no. 1 (2024): 24-25.
  
  
• Book review of Folk Masters: A Portrait of America by Barry Bergey and Tom Pich in Material Culture Review 86 (2017).

Fields of study: Canadian Cultural and Religious History, First World War
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisors: Dr. Sean Kennedy, Dr. Heidi MacDonald, Dr. Ross Hebb
Education: BComm (Dal ’90), MBA (Dal ’92), MA (UNB ’18) •

Working dissertation title: “‘Faith Cries Out for Knowledge’: Death and Grief During the Great War, the Search for Consolation, and the Rise of Spiritualism in Anglophone Protestant Canada”

My research considers grief and consolation during and after the Great War, and why an anecdotally significant number of English Protestant Canadians mourning their war dead assuaged their grief by adapting spiritualism to their Christian beliefs.

In an increasingly materialist and religiously sceptical age, spiritualism’s appeal for certain mourners resided in its accessible answers to questions about postmortem life, one where relationships survive death and remain mutually active.

Such assertions restored for some Protestants the comforts accessible in Catholic doctrine which Reformation theology had discarded, and which Biblical Criticism undermined.

While some Protestant mourners experimented in communication with their war dead, I argue that the vast majority preferred the private consumption of popular spiritualist books as identified in church and secular press discourses.

Concluding with novelist L.M. Montgomery as a representative case study, this research is a first in Canadian cultural and Great War historiographies.

Publications:

• Book Review of Hanneke Takken’s Churches, Chaplains and the Great War (London & New York: Routledge, 2019) in First World War Studies 15, no. 2 (Summer 2024).
  
  
• “‘It’s a Holy War which we are waging’: The Unique Case of Bishop John Richardson in the Anglican Church’s Great War Crusade,” Officers’ Quarters (York-Sunbury Museum, Fall 2022).
  
  
• “Chaplains of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918: Modern Revisionism on One Hundred Years of Historiographical Development,” The British Journal of Canadian Studies (Spring 2021).

Fields of study: Gender, History of Medicine, History of Nursing, Military History
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Cindy Brown
Education: BA Hons. History (UNB), MA History (Saint Mary’s)

Dissertation title: “‘Some of the sisters have shell shock as well as wounds’: War Trauma in First World War Canadian Nursing Sisters”

My research examines First World War Canadian Nursing Sisters and their experiences with war trauma, such as shell shock, their treatment, and the perception of their illness by other officers, their families, and wider society.

Through their personnel and medical files, and other written accounts, my thesis pieces together their wartime service, the conditions they faced, and the steps they took to recover.

These women were also officers in the military, a rank which had never been granted to women before, and which greatly influenced the view of the military and physicians of their illness, along with their gender.

The women’s view of their or other women’s trauma is more difficult to trace. The experiences of these women add a new element to the study of class, gender, mental health and trauma that, until recently, has been largely focused on men, thus contributing to a greater understanding of the consequences of war.

Fields of study: Military History, Atlantic World History
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisors: Dr. Lee Windsor (UNBF) and Dr. Roger Sarty (WLU)
Education: BA (Hons.), MA, LLB

Working dissertation title: “Douglas Hazen and the Business of Empires at War”

Fields of study: Settler Colonialism, Canadian History, Migration and Transnationalism, Scandinavian History
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Angela Tozer
Education: BA (Hons.) English and Norwegian, BA Icelandic (U of Iceland ’20), MA Inter-American Studies (U of Iceland ’20), Dipl. Translation Studies (U of Iceland ’21)

Working dissertation title: “Model Settlers, Dirty Foreigners, and Colonial Agents: Icelandic Settlers in Nova Scotia & Atlantic Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1867-1914”

My dissertation examines “Markland,” a short-lived Icelandic settlement in Nova Scotia (1875-1882). Focusing on lives and journeys of the Markland settlers, my project examines developments in post-Confederation immigration policy as well as larger questions about whiteness, mobility, and the roles of non-British settlers in the British Empire.

Immediately after Confederation, Canada encouraged bloc settlements of various European settlers as a convenient way to fulfill its settler colonial objectives. Aided by federal subsidies, both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick initially supported new agrarian settlements, but stopped by the mid-1870s.

This seems to have been partly caused by unrealistic expectations of the settlers’ self-reliance and by refocusing the Dominion’s immigration infrastructure: no more immigration conferences, no more subsidies, and Prairie settlement was now a priority.

By the early 1880s, Canada’s policy discourse was much more uniform in encouraging British settlers first and foremost, and the Maritime provinces never supported another bloc settlement.

Publications:

• “‘...There Is a Strong Leaven of the Old Norse Blood in Nearly All of Us:’ Settler Colonialism and the Vínland Mythology on the East Coast of North America,” in Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World, eds. Cordelia Heß, Solveig Marie Wang, and Erik Wolf (DeGruyter, forthcoming Dec 2024)
  
  
• “The Search for a Promised Land: Three Settlement Plans, Three Agents, and Three Handbooks for Icelandic Migrant-Settlers from 1875,” Settler Colonial Studies 14, no. 3 (2024): 1-27.
  
  
• “‘An Icelandic Driver’: J. Magnús Bjarnason’s Story as a History of Immigrant Hierarchy, Erasure, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Halifax: An Introduction and Translation.” Scandinavian-Canadian Studies / Études scandinaves au Canada 30 (2023).

Fields of study: Indigenous and colonial histories of early modern Newfoundland and Labrador/the “Greater Gulf”/Northeast/North America
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisors: Dr. Sasha Mullally and Dr. Nicole O’Byrne (UNB Law)
Education: BA English (U of Arizona, ’11), MA English (Dal, ’14), MA History (MUN ’19)

Working dissertation title: “With whom we are connected”: Indigenous Nations, New France, and British Colonial Policy-Formation in Newfoundland and Labrador to 1833

During the long eighteenth century, British imperial policy came to regard Newfoundland and Labrador as increasingly specialised fishing and fur-trading zones, where settlers’ ability to own land as property was severely restricted.

Within these zones, “encouraging the fishery” was the legal ideology governing English Newfoundland’s expansion into Beothuk, Mi’kmaw, Innu, and Inuit territory. Unlike New France or New England, however, before the 1760s “England’s oldest colony” had no experience conducting formal, peaceful relations with Indigenous peoples.

But the emergence of St. John’s from apparent isolation is misleading. Since the sixteenth century the English in Newfoundland had been surrounded by Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, Inuit, and French fishermen, fur-traders, and colonists.

My dissertation traces the evolution of colonial policy towards Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador from uncertain beginnings, anti-French paranoia, and postwar policy-formation to the more confident attitudes galvanized by the rise of “the Colony” in the early nineteenth century.

Fields of study: First World War, Canadian History, Science and Technology
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisor: Dr. Lee Windsor
Education: BA International Relations (U of Windsor ’92), MA War Studies (RMC ’97), MA History (UNB ’99)

Dissertation title: “Beans, Bullets, and Bridges: Logistic Operations and Mobility in the Canadian Corps, 1914-1918”

My research examines the new concept of combat support services required to feed, clothe, provide ammunition, and transport armies in the transitional era of horse drawn wagons and early motor transport during the First World War.

I argue that this innovation in support services enabled the Canadian Corps to be more successful in battle than the other British Corps. Without effective logistic and engineer support, it would have been impossible to maintain offensives much beyond a day.

Further, this support service expertise became so well practiced, that in the Final Hundred Days of the war, the Canadian Corps was able to plan, prepare, and execute new attacks on a weekly basis compared to the six-week time frame needed in 1917.

This enhanced combined service support became a hallmark of the Canadian Army operations that continues to this day.

Publications:

• “Vital Links: Roads and Light Railways in the Military Operations of the Canadian Corps during the First World War,” Scientia Canadensis 45, no. 1 (2023): 91-110.
  
  
• “The First World War and the Homefront in Canada: Broadening the Analysis,” Acadiensis 50, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 149-162.
  
  
• “The Shipbuilding Career of Gaius S. Turner of Harvey Bank, NB, 1874-1892,” The Northern Mariner 10, no. 3 (July 2000): 15-48.

Fields of study: Atlantic World History, Canadian History, Environmental History, Maritime History
Campus: Saint John
Supervisors: Dr. Erin Spinney (UNBSJ) & Dr. Joshua MacFadyen (UPEI)
Education: BA Hons. History (STU ’15), MA History (UNB ’17)

Dissertation title: “Navigating a Marine Commons: The Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Challenges of Maritime Safety, 1815-1867”

“Navigating a Marine Commons” explores the intersections of environment, governance, and navigational safety in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to better understand the complex regulatory and financing arrangements that were put in place between the 1810s through the 1860s.

These measures were taken, in part, to alleviate the perceived crisis of shipwrecks, loss of human life, and valuable cargo. In the Gulf, these challenges to safe navigation were typically shared and resulted in questions of jurisdiction. For example: Whose responsibility was it to pay for the infrastructure to save lives in areas with little to no human population?

The goal of this dissertation project is to offer a new conceptual framework into which seemingly unconnected pieces of historical evidence can be joined together by focusing on marine and littoral spaces as spaces of both transition and intersection.

Publications:

• Zachary A. Tingley and Elizabeth Mancke, “Intercolonial Cooperation and the Building of St. Paul and Scatarie Island Lighthouses, 1826-2840,” Acadiensis 51, no. 2 (2022): 60-90.