Please note that we are rarely able to offer institutional funding to International applicants at the MA level. If there is the possibility of obtaining financial support from a funding agency in your home country, or you have access to other sources of funding, please contact the Graduate Supervisor to discuss your application. We are sometimes able to offer funding to International applicants to the PhD program – again, please contact the Graduate Supervisor.

A Q&A with Ona Bantjes-Rafols, History MA student

Though she spent the first year of her MA degree meeting with professors and peers online during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ona Bantjes-Rafols has made the most of those connections. Now entering her second year, Ona has developed the same diverse skills she would have in the classroom, plus added abilities to adapt her methods to suit our changing world.

We caught up with Ona on her second (ever) visit to Carleton University’s campus to discuss her work, her specialization in Digital Humanities, and the many bonds she’s forged through Carleton’s History community.

• Could you tell me a bit about your path to your MA, and why you chose Carleton?

I did my Honours BA in History at Concordia University, where I was lucky enough to take a lot of fantastic seminars, do in-depth research, and present at student conferences, which were helpful experiences in deciding I wanted to do an MA. When I went to my professors for advice on where to go, I was told that if I was looking for a similar environment to the History department at Concordia, I should go to Carleton, where I would find lots of support and that new approaches to doing history were encouraged.

The Digital Humanities specialization was a big draw for me, as I was really interested in learning new ways to make my research accessible to broader publics. When I met my supervisor-to-be Dr. Jennifer Evans, she had so much enthusiasm and so many suggestions for my research that I decided Carleton was the place for me.

• Does your thesis have a cu_people_job_title? And how would you begin to describe what you’re aiming to achieve?

It has a tentative cu_people_job_title that will almost definitely change, as cu_people_job_titles have never been my forte. In “Queering Space: Memories and Maps of Queer 1970s Barcelona” I am taking a new approach to the history of queer life activism in 1970s Barcelona, analyzing this history through a spatial lens and focusing on the personal. As part of my thesis I created a digital map of memories, I am developing a walking tour currently, and I will be conducting oral history interviews this fall.

I’ll be using these different approaches to explore the interconnections of space and memory in relation to the history of queer life during Spain’s complicated political transition.

• Why Barcelona, and what’s significant about the 1970s time period?

I am part Catalan, and spent a lot of time in Barcelona growing up. I was always fascinated by my aunts’ and uncles’ stories about growing up during the dictatorship, and in particular the complicated and contested transition to democracy in the 1970s. I found out about the gay rights movements that emerged in the 1970s for an undergraduate research paper, and became really interested in the relationship between queer activism and the political transition in the Spanish State at that time, and all the disagreements that emerged between activists over how best to change their world.

Often, even outside the United States, when people think of queer history, they only think of New York, and Stonewall, but of course there were many movements that emerged in very different political situations and with their own cultural and linguistic complexities that deserve their own spotlight as well. The English-language scholarship on Barcelona’s queer history is quite scarce, so I am excited to introduce more people to these histories.

• How are you incorporating digital humanities and mapping into your project, and what value does it bring?

I am really passionate about digital humanities as a tool for bringing research projects to a much wider audience – although I do actually enjoy academic articles, I know not everyone has the time, or most importantly, the access to read them. The digital sphere also opens up possibilities for communicating research in different ways, visually or orally for example.

I created a digital interactive map based on published interviews with people who involved with the gay rights movement in the 1970s in Barcelona, which was very helpful for me in my research to get a sense of where these moments were happening, what sites were important and for what reasons. It also connected me to people with similar interests which has been wonderful – it can be hard to make connections when you only work from home! I am currently working on the Catalan translation in order to share it with more people in Barcelona and have it serve as a resource for educators and others.

• I’m curious about your use of oral history. Could you walk us through what you’ve learned about the method in your time at Carleton, and how you’ve approached the process with respect to your thesis project?

My interest in oral history began during my time at Concordia University, and was central to my MA thesis idea from the start. My initial plan, pre-COVID, involved interviewing techniques like “memory mapping”, where I would ask participants to draw the spaces of Barcelona that were important to them during our interview. I tried to think about how I could adapt that style of interviewing to a remote interview, but eventually decided that I preferred to leave that for another time, and instead focus on asking questions that could bring out their own spatial understandings of their history.

I conducted oral history interviews over Zoom this spring for a side research project on Spanish immigration to Canada, and found that doing interviews through video conferencing is much more difficult than in person – it’s much harder to build trust, and to ease into questions. However, it became very unclear whether I would be able to go to Barcelona for field work, and so I shifted my focus a bit so that I was not relying on solely using interviews with the memory mapping technique. I still hope to explore that style of interviewing someday, but I’ve decided not to make it the main focus, because it is always a possibility that interviews have to switch to the online setting.

• What’s one thing about your MA research that has surprised you, opened your eyes, or taken your academic journey in an unexpected direction?

I began developing a walking tour with a collaborator in Barcelona based on the digital map I created, as another way to make the research more accessible to people in Barcelona. After talking about it with Prof. Evans, we realized I could include that experience in my thesis as a way to explore another aspect of doing spatial history – what changes when you’re walking through this city’s history, rather than moving through a map of it? How do we create a walking tour that is socially conscious, and not geared for tourism? These are some of the questions that I am finding really exciting, and which are bringing me in directions I was not expecting at all!

• What have you learned from your supervisor, Professor Jennifer Evans, and from other professors, and your peers?

Learning to adapt and let go of old expectations has been really necessary as a graduate student during COVID-19, and Prof. Evans has been very helpful in pushing me to consider new angles or different opportunities within what was possible for me research-wise. She also pushed me to draw from disciplinary streams that I would not have necessarily considered, and to read theorists that seemed daunting but that had a lot of rich and helpful ideas once I dug in.

I was also lucky to have the help of Professor Shawn Graham with the digital humanities aspect, he gave me tutorials on coding and put me in touch with the wonderful GIS librarians at Carleton, in particular Rebecca Bartlett who has taught me a lot about preparing data for mapping.

I have also received a lot of very helpful feedback from my peers through a club that myself and fellow MA students Danielle Carron and Sammy Holmes created together called the History Grad Research Club, where we present our research to each other and through that experience find new ideas to explore and important connections between our work. We are continuing that this year, and hopefully others will take it up once we graduate!

• Where do you hope your degree takes you?

I am passionate about making historical research accessible, and love researching in general, so I am looking to careers that can include those aspects. My experiences creating digital exhibits, working as a teaching assistant, and as a research assistant to the Gendered Design in STEAM project at Carleton are all providing me with valuable new skills and have opened my eyes to other career possibilities that I had not considered before, which I think is an important part of an MA degree.

• What would you say to a prospective student thinking about pursuing a history degree at Carleton?

I would definitely recommend the History department at Carleton – I have had a really good experience, even though I have not yet stepped inside the physical department since starting, due to COVID-19 restrictions! There was a lot of effort on the part of the students to foster community despite the situation, and I had great professors who were very accommodating and quick to adapt. I also recommend the Digital Humanities specialization to anyone with interest in exploring what digital tools can do and how best to use them, I had very few digital skills when I began and am leaving having learned a lot.

The Digital Humanities is a broad term for exploring how we understand amongst other things art, film, music, literature, popular culture, collective memory, history, and material culture through the lens of digital technologies. It is also about exploring how the use of such technologies changes the kinds of questions we can ask, as well as the way such technologies change us as scholars. It is a reflexive approach to using and thinking about the impacts of digital technologies as we pursue our research.

Students in DH tackle research questions such as: How are digital publishing, social media, and surveillance altering personal and communal identities? Can 3D modelling produce new understandings of material culture? How do we write good history through immersive media like video games?

History students pursuing the collaborative MA in DH have explored the ways industrial sounds can be used to trigger memory for oral history, the use of ‘projection mapping’ to re-insert contentious histories into public spaces, and recreating historical social networks from archives.

For a crowdsourced perspective on the many facets of the Digital Humanities, visit Jason Heppler’s ‘What is Digital Humanities‘ website. Hit ‘reload’ to load up a new definition.

Students in the collaborative MA in Digital Humanities produce a wide variety of work. The key thing is that the medium should support the overall message of the work. There is no one typical kind of project that students do. Students in past years have produced interactive maps of lost industrial soundscapes, network analyses of correspondence between former internees in Canada’s WWII internment camps, and augmented reality for confronting the lost history of a place.

You do not need to be a self-identified ‘techy’ to be successful. If you can write an email, use a wordprocessor, or an online bibliographic catalogue, you can learn what you need to know. Part of the journey in the program is to learn how to look inside the black box of our computing devices, to figure out what assumptions are left unsaid, and to turn the power of computing towards our humanistic goals. We work with you to identify what aspects of the digital world are germane to your research, and how to achieve the necessary proficiency so you can do your research.

Students in past years have learned how to data mine, do text analysis, do network analyses, build databases and website, sonify data, or represent historical arguments via video gaming.

In the past three years, Carleton University M.A. in Public History Students as well as undergraduate History practicum students have been employed by the following partners:

• Aga Khan Foundation
• Archives and Research Collections, Carleton University
• Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Canadian Medical Association
• Canadian Museum of History
• Canadian War Museum
• Canada’s Science and Technology Museum
• Carleton Immersive Media Studio
• Carleton University Corporate Archives
• City of Ottawa
• Council of Heritage Organizations of Ottawa
• Diefenbunker Museum
• Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Arts and Cultures
• Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada
• Know History
• Library and Archives Canada
• National Capital Commission
• Parks Canada
• Partnership Africa Canada
• Skate Canada
• Worker’s History Museum
  
  

We would also like to acknowledge the following partners who have also supported internships and practicum students in the past:          

• Abiwin Coop Project
• Alberta Heritage (Ukrainian Village)
• Archives of Martinique
• Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC)
• Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Canada Agricultural Museum
• Canadian Association of Professors of Obstetrics and Genecology
• Canada Aviation and Space Museum
• Canadian Family History Project
• Canadian Policy Research Network
• Canadian Heritage
• Canadian Postal Museum
• Department of National Defence
• Eigg Road Consulting
• Federal Heritage Building Review Office
• Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada
• Friends of Fairfields (Pinhey’s Point)
• Health Canada – Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) Research
• History to Knowledge
• Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire, Ottawa Branch
• International Research Development Centre
• Lowertown Heritage
• National Research Council
• Nepean Museum
• Niagara Parks Commission
• Office of the Curator of the House of Commons
• Ottawa Jewish Archives
• Ottawa South research project
• Parliamentary Library
• Rideau Valley Conservation Authority
• Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons
• University of Alberta Archives

To all we are grateful for the support. The experiences and mentorship extended towards our students is fundamental to their education and their professional careers. Indeed, all of us partners should take pride in the incredible work and successes of our students.

Carleton’s Public History Program actively promotes public history in Canada and across the globe. Our faculty have been involved in the Canadian Historical Association’s Public History Network and the Carleton Centre for Public History offers logistical support to the committee responsible for the CHA’s annual Public History prize.

Carleton History is an official partner of both the National Council on Public History (NCPH), the world’s oldest international association of public historians based in the United States founded in 1980, and the International Federation for Public History (IFPH),  founded in 2009. Adjunct Research Professor Jean-Pierre Morin is the chair of NCPH’s Long Range Planning Committee. Professor David Dean is a member of the IFPH’s steering committee.  Each year a Carleton faculty member is on the IFPH’s annual conference organizing committee. Professor John Walsh will be serving that role for the next conference taking place in Sao Paulo, Brazil in August 2018.

David Dean is also co-editor, with Dr. Andreas Etges of the University of Munich, of IFPH’s new journal International Public History. His role has been made possible thanks to financial support of Carleton’s Office of the Vice President Research and International.

Carleton public history faculty and students are regular participants in international conferences and you can read about their contributions on their individual profiles (see the links provided on the Our Faculty and Our Students pages).

When most people think about public history they think it refers to historians who work outside academia, in museums or archives, in television and film, or who are engaged in digitizing history on the web, carrying out research for companies or writing popular historical works. All of this is true, but public history is also much more.

In broad terms, public history deals with the ways in which history is created and presented in the public arena. This includes traditional sites of institutional history (like museums and archives), but it can also refer to many different sites of collective memory and how history is expressed in film, on the web, or in photographic scrapbooks. To study public history is to come to terms with the contested nature of history itself, and to situate narratives of history within a broader field of public memory, identity, and political/institutional interests.

Carleton is one of the best places in North America to study public history. In part, this is because our MA program draws on twenty years of collaboration between public historians at the university and public historians employed outside academia. Being located in the nation’s capital allows us to benefit from collaborations with key institutions such as national and local museums and archives, research firms, government departments and non-profit organizations.

With eight core faculty currently, and double that number as adjuncts and associates, not to mention over a dozen colleagues in other disciplines working on key issues in the field, we have the largest number of academic public historians at any university in Canada and more than most programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

Three particular features distinguish our program:

• We are committed to international public history. Although most of our core faculty research and teach Canadian public history, others focus their work on European, African and Caribbean history and we have strong connections with public historians internationally.
• We are committed to combining applied history with historical theory. Our paid internships and course project work are complemented by a compulsory seminar in historical theory and all our seminars require students to think theoretically and reflexively about their work.
• We are committed to helping our students make original contributions to knowledge in both traditional and non-traditional formats. The culmination of our two-year degree is the Masters Research Essay (MRE). The MRE most often takes the form of an essay, but we encourage, and have the resources to support alternatives. Students have produced MREs that have taken forms such as films, staged performances, graphic novels, digital soundscapes, podcasts, and exhibits.

Our program has been designed to equip students with an enhanced awareness of the specific challenges of applying historical knowledge and methodologies in the public sphere. It allows flexibility to meet the needs of those seeking employment in the field of public history, as well as providing a solid interdisciplinary grounding for those who wish to pursue further graduate studies in history or other disciplines.

As you will see if you explore the profiles of our core and adjunct faculty, many of us collaborate and work with public historians across Ottawa and the national capital region. This means that many of our students are able to draw on expertise and knowledge from practitioners and historians working in our national and local museums, in government departments, in the National Capital Commission, and the many private research firms that employ historians to work in the regions archives and research collections from Library and Archives Canada to the Canadian Conservation Institute, from the City of Ottawa’s local history collections to the libraries and collections of the national museums. You will find our students exploring artifacts at the Canadian Museum of History, reading First World War diaries at the Canadian War Museum, or working through advertisements for domestic technologies at Canada’s Science and Technology Museum. They will be on the streets examining monuments and heritage buildings, participating (and sometimes leading) walking tours and they may be on our stages performing history through film, digital media, or theatre.

Our classrooms often involve active collaboration with public history practitioners through course based projects. Our students have curated online exhibits for Canada’s Science and Technology Museum, developed exhibit proposals for the same museum as well as the Canadian Agricultural Museum, the Canadian Aviation Museum, the Canadian War Museum, and the Canadian History Museum. They have created exhibits – online, travelling, and in situ – for many local museums and heritage organizations. Recently those in a museums and public memory seminar curated 17 installations across the city for the Ottawa-based Workers’ History Museum’s 2017 project. We’ve provided some links below to media coverage for you to learn more about such course based projects. Sometimes we collaborate with public history institutions beyond Ottawa and even Ontario, as with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Finally, of course our Capital Advantage is experienced especially in our paid Internship program about which you can read more here:

• Students Collaborate with Curators at the Canadian Museum of History
• Workers’ History Museum’s Ottawa2017 project Capital History Kiosks

As well as having the largest cluster of academic public historians in Canada, there are many faculty and graduate students at Carleton working in complementary fields. This means that our graduate students can take seminars and get research advice from colleagues in related disciplines such as Architecture (Steven Fai)  Anthropology and Sociology (Tonya Davidson), Art and Culture which includes Art History, Film Studies and Music (Carol Payne), Business (Leighann Neilson), Indigenous Studies and Canadian Studies (Peter Hodgins), Communications and Journalism (Miranda Brady), Law (Stacy Douglas), Public Policy (Frances Abele) and others. These are active relationships with colleagues whose work is widely read by public historians as you can see for yourself if you click on the names of just a few examples noted above.

When we think of the “Carleton Advantage” we are also thinking of the outstanding research and project work carried out within the framework of Carleton University Research Centres. The Carleton Centre for Public History is one, but others where public history work takes place include the Centre for Indigenous Research, Culture, Language and Education, the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, and the Carleton Immersive Media Studio.

We also enjoy collaborations with colleagues in Migration and Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. There is obvious synergy between our MA program and Carleton’s prestigious MA in Heritage Conservation.

Besides the opportunity to take seminars and work with faculty and students in related fields, Carleton has recently developed two exciting programs that our students can take advantage of: the Diploma in Curatorial Studies and the Collaborative Masters in Digital Humanities. Things are always on the go at Carleton, for example there are discussions about collaboration across many disciplines, including public history, to develop work in performance and performance studies.

The Garth Wilson Fellowship

Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation & Carleton’s MA in Public History

The Garth Wilson Fellowship in Public History is a 2-year fellowship offered by Ingenium and Carleton University’s Department of History. It celebrates our collaboration with Canada’s Science and Technology Museum and is in the memory of Garth Wilson (1960-2010) who was the Curator of Transportation at the museum from 1989 until 2010. He was a passionate advocate of museology with interest in public history, transportation history, and material culture. He was highly respected for the intelligence, imagination and discipline that he brought to the collecting of artifacts, writing and editing of professional and general interest publications, curating of exhibitions, and teaching of museum studies.

The Fellowship provides a graduate student with an excellent opportunity to participate in public history projects at a national museum, gain valuable work experience in this competitive field, and have unique access to materials that contribute to a student’s research interests. The funding supports training, research travel, conference participation, and on-line and print publications.

Garth Wilson Fellows:

• Sara McGillivray (2014-16)
• Phoebe Mannell (2016-17)
• Dany Guay-Belanger (2017-18)
• Cristina Wood (2018-19)
• Camas Clowater-Eriksson (2019-2020)
• Victoria Hawco (2020/2021)
• Jaime Simons (2021/2022)