The History Honours program gives students the opportunity to complete a research project with guidance from History faculty. Students will present their work at the annual History Honours Conference, which is held in May of each year.
Students who are interested in completing a History Honours can contact the History Department Coordinator, Nicole.Kungle@ufv.ca for more information or visit the UFV Academic Calendar program page for the History Honours.
Funding Opportunity: Students conducting research as part of the History Honours program may be eligible for financial support through the Research and Graduates Studies office. The Student-led Research Grant provides funding of up to $1,500 to support student research projects.
Note: HIST 400 and HIST 440 may not be offered in the same academic year.
Past History Honours Student Research Projects
"The Liminal Lives of Fools In Tudor Courts and Society" by Jakob Petersen
Abstract:
This project aims to deepen historical understanding of court fools who lived under the Tudor dynasty through a “fool-centric” approach informed by disability studies. In doing so, it addresses an understudied question: how disability affected the social positioning of fools. Focusing on one specific Tudor fool, William Sommers, this paper reframes historical understanding through a reinterpretation of a series of primary sources. By reconsidering fashion, ability, and relationships through the lens of disability studies, alongside a biographical examination of Sommers, the paper examines the marginal, paradoxical, and liminal ways fools were socially understood throughout the Tudor period. Additionally, it demonstrates how the various Tudor monarchs shaped and altered these perceptions at court.
“Home, Memory, and Lesbian Community in Brooklyn, 1968–1979” by Danika Thomson
Abstract:
"My paper examines the development of lesbian community in Brooklyn between 1968 and 1979, with particular attention to the relationship between home, memory, and everyday community formation. While dominant narratives of post-Stonewall queer history have often centered Manhattan’s bars, activism, and public protest, this study shifts focus to Brooklyn as a crucial site of lesbian social, cultural, and political life. Drawing on newsletters such as Echo of Sappho, materials from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and related primary and secondary sources, the paper argues that lesbian community was built not only in formal organizations or commercial spaces, but also through domestic networks, print culture, informal gathering places, and shared practices of self-documentation. These spaces and networks allowed lesbians to circulate information, negotiate identity, debate politics, and create forms of belonging outside heterosexual and male-dominated institutions. By foregrounding Brooklyn, this project challenges Manhattan-centered accounts of queer history and demonstrates that lesbian community-making was deeply tied to questions of place, memory, and the preservation of everyday life. In doing so, it positions lesbian print and archival cultures not simply as records of community, but as active forces in producing and sustaining it."
"Music in a Time of War: Samuel Scheidt and the Thirty Years' War" by Ina van Dijk
Abstract:
The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) has long been characterized as a European tragedy, one of unimaginable violence and unmitigated misery, a time of religious feuds, of battles and sieges, famine and plague, death and destruction. Its history is a complicated tangle of alliances and power struggles between states and rulers that is difficult to comprehend 400 years later. Its legacy of suffering was remembered for centuries afterwards in the German lands.
The musician Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654) lived and worked during these years in the small town of Halle in Saxony. Halle is rarely mentioned in the history books, and Scheid has been mostly forgotten. Yet it is worthwhile investigating his life, as he survived the marauding armies that occupied Halle, the loss of his court benefactor, the famine and the plague that took his four children. What cultural influence did he have, and why should we remember him?
"The Red Spectre: The Public Presence of Marxist and Socialist Thought in British Columbian Organized Labour 1901-1925" by Aidan Spence
Abstract:
While organized labour in Canada would have a surge in relevance over the course of the First World War, the period culminating in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, labour in British Columbia proved a fiercely relevant force well before that. Whether in the form of trade unions, socialist political parties, or a combination, organized labour would make its mark on BC politics. However, despite what paranoid politicians may have stated, the amount of socialism in many of these organizations is under question. Some groups leaned into doctrinaire government labour policy, and some were only slightly more radical, while others were self-professed Marxists and Bolshevik supporters. Using a combination of secondary and primary sources, the latter mostly taking the form of labour-affiliated newspapers, this paper evaluates not just the amount, but the varieties and nuances of Marxist and Socialist thought in the labour landscape of British Columbia.
"How Mission was Changed: An Analysis of the Growth, Change and Denial of Identity of the Japanese Canadian Community in Mission, B.C." by Ryan Crawford
Abstract:
From their earliest arrival in 1904 until their eventual displacement in 1942 as part of a larger response by the Canadian Government to the outset of war with Japan, Mission’s Japanese settlers played a pivotal role in helping to grow the city’s community. As they settled, farmed and developed their livelihoods within Mission, a distinctly unique identity began to take root, synthesized from the traditions carried with them during their immigration and the necessities of living in a new country, an identity which was ultimately fractured as a result of the federal government’s policies of internment during the second world war. This analysis examines the many stories of Mission’s Japanese community in order to understand the consequences born out of the Canadian government’s policies, with particular focus paid towards stories of individuals and community organizations alike. Through firsthand accounts of life before and during internment conducted by the Mission Community Archives, as well as evaluation of custodian case files compiled as part of the Landscapes of Injustice Project, the racist actions of the Canadian government denied some six hundred members of Mission’s population the right to belong to the community they helped to foster.