Vivek Venkatesh, PhD

Education

B.A. University of Pittsburgh, M.A., Ph.D. York University (Toronto)

Ronald Rudin, author of eight books and numerous articles and producer of eight documentary films, carries out research that touches upon Canadian cultural and environmental history, with a particular focus on Atlantic Canada and its Acadian population.

Professor Rudin's interests in cultural and environmental history are front and centre in his most recent book, Against the Tides: Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada's Maritime Marshlands (UBC Press, 2021). The book explores the legacy of the federal government's large-scale project after World War II to reconstruct the dykes and aboiteaux that had long protected lands in both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick from the tides of the Bay of Fundy. This federal program (the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration) led to environmental and cultural changes that are still evident in the early twenty-first century. This book is accompanied by the film Unnatural Landscapes that Rudin produced and Bernar Hébert directed.

This focus on the cultural and environmental history of Atlantic Canada also underpins Professor Rudin's current research project whose jumping off point is the 1959 Escuminac Disaster that saw the decimation of the drift-net fishing fleet that was struck by a freak hurricane while harvesting Atlantic salmon in the Gulf of St-Lawrence, just beyond Miramichi Bay, on the east coast of New Brunswick. The project explores how the community survived following the loss of 35 men, looking both at the role of private philanthropy and the increasingly interventionist provincial government. Secondly, the project considers drift-net fishing from an environmental perspective, exploring the conflict between recreational fishers upstream on the Miramichi and the drift-net fishers in the Bay. Ultimately, the lobbying of the anglers -- together with mounting evidence that industrial fishing was decimating salmon stocks -- led to a temporary ban on commercial salmon fishing in 1972, that became permanent in the 1980s Finally, the project examines the place of English-speakers and Acadians in the communities that were involved in the salmon fisheries, but which lived apart from one another.

Professor Rudin has also served as director of the Lost Stories Project, which takes little known stories about the Canadian past, transforms them into public art, and then documents the process by way of documentary film. The project's five films -- that Rudin produced --  are available in English, French and (in one case) ASL at http://loststories.ca.

View Vivek Venkatesh's CV

Books

Against the Tides: Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada's Maritime Marshlands (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021)

Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

Remembering and forgetting in Acadie:  A historian's Journey through Public Memory.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.[Translated as L'Acadie entre le souvenir et l'oubli: Un historien sur les chemins de la mémoire collective. Montreal: Boréal, 2014.]

Founding Fathers: Champlain and Laval in the Streets of Quebec, 1878-1908. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. [Translated as: Histoire dans les rues de Québec.  Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2005]

Making History in Twentieth Century Quebec. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. [Translated as: Faire de l'histoire au Québec. Sillery QC: Septentrion, 1998]

In Whose Interest?: Quebec's Caisses Populaires,1900-1945. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990.

Banking en français:The French Banks of Quebec,1835-1925. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. [Translated as: Banking en français: Histoire des banques canadiennes-françaises. Montréal: Boréal, 1988]

The Forgotten Quebecers: A History of English-Speaking Quebec, 1759-1980. Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1985. [Translated as: Histoire du Québec anglophone. Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1986].

Selected Journal Articles

"The First Acadian Film: Visibility, Modernity, and Landscape in Les aboiteaux, Canadian Historical Review, 96 (2015), 507-33.

"The First French-Canadian National Parks: Kouchibouguac and Forillon in History and Memory," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 22, no 1 (2011), 160-200.

"Making Kouchibouguac: Acadians, the Creation of a National Park, and the Politics of Documentary Film during the 1970s," Acadiensis, Vol XXXIX, no. 2, Summer/Fall 2010, 3-22.

"The Champlain-De Monts Tercentenary: Voices from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Maine, June 1904," Acadiensis, 33 (Spring 2004), 3-26.

"Retour sur les vingt premières années de l'Institut: Regards sur l'IHAF et la RHAF à l'époque de Groulx," Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 51 (1997), 24 pages.

"Revisionism and the Search for a Normal Society: A Critique of Recent Historical Writing in Quebec," Canadian Historical Review, 53 (1992), 31 pages.

Selected Book Chapters

"Qui est Clio, et qu'est-ce l'Acadie?" in Patrick D. Clarke, ed., Clio en Acadie (Ste-Foy: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2014), pp 243-55.

"Dugua vs Champlain: The Construction of Heroes in Atlantic Canada," in Nicole Neatby and Peter Hodgins, eds., Settling and Unsettling Memories: Essays in Canadian Public History (University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp 94-131

Kouchibouguac: Representations of a Park in Acadian Popular Culture," in Claire Campbell, ed., A Century of Parks Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2011), pp 205-33.

"Unravelling Dichotomies: Ethnic and Civic understanding of the Nation in Quebec Nationalist Discourse," in Bruno Coppieters and Richard Sakwa, Contextualizing Secession - Normative Studies in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: OUP, 2004).

"Réflexions québécoises alimentées par l'expérience irlandaise," in Stéphane Kelly, ed, Les idées mènent le Québec: Essais sur une sensibilité historique (Ste-Foy: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003).

"From the Nation to the Citizen: Quebec Historical Writing and the Shaping of Identity," in Robert Adamoski, Dorothy E. Chunn and Robert Menzies, eds.,  Contesting Canadian Citizenship: Historical Readings (Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 95-111.

"Bargaining from Strength: Historical Writing and Political Autonomy in Late-Twentieth-Century Quebec," in Bruno Coppieters and Michel Huysseune,  Secession, History and the Social Sciences (Brussels: VUB Brussels University Press, 2002), pp.159-177.

"The Discovery of the Body of Mgr François de Laval and the Construction of Identity in Quebec," in Jean-Pierre Wallot, ed, Constructions identitaires et pratiques sociales (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2002), pp. 229-242.

"Contested Terrain: Commemorative Celebrations and National Identity in Ireland and Quebec," in Yvan Lamonde  and Gérard Bouchard, eds., La nation dans tous ses états : le Québec en comparaison. Montréal: Harmattan, 1997.