We’re back today with everyone’s favourite series, Historian’s Histories! If you’d like to see more posts from this series, you can do so here. This latest entry features Andrew Nurse – Editor of Acadiensis, baseball fan, and Historian at Mount Allison University.
Andrew Nurse lives in Sackville, NB, the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq and Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) peoples, with his wife and daughter (and formally a son who has moved away). He teaches Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University.
What is your background (education, life experience, etc..)?
I have been at this gig longer than I care to admit. My family is from Newfoundland and New Brunswick; I grew up in Nova Scotia and worked in the standard series of jobs that kids worked in back then and likely today: fast food, painting, research assistant, and the like. I worked for a while at what was then called the Public Archives of Nova Scotia right after I completed my BA and I liked that job. It was collegial and, for the people who visited the archives, it was clearly important.
What shapes my life experience now, however, is not those things but the things that have occurred since I started working at Mount Allison: my family, the community in which I live, changes to the academy, the rise of neoliberalism, but most particularly what draws me to fora like Unwritten Histories is the need to be active in resisting the political conscription of history. I’ve seen this first hand, and we can leave off specifics since I don’t want to offend anyone, but also more importantly at the national level, particularly under the Harper government.
What drew you to history in the first place?
I don’t know, but I do know what convinced me to study history. I was in the second year of my undergrad and decided to change my major. A friend suggested I sit in on a course she really loved – an introduction to Canadian social history – and it was amazing. The professor – Michael Cross – presented history in a way that was challenging and exciting. His lectures highlighted the mistakes of the past, Great Depression policy failures for instance, but also what I would later start calling the ironies of the past, after I read Hayden White in grad school. I loved it because he captured the range of human emotions, intentions, and foibles. I still think this is a model for historians to emulate.
Why did you decide to become a historian?
Again, I’d have to say that I am not sure. I teach in a Canadian Studies program and so I don’t teach history per se. My research remains historical and I have a lot to say about the organization of the Canadian narrative or narratives in my courses. I self identify as an historian because I adopt an historical methodology and in other things that I do, I look to show how an historical approach can bring a different and informative light to bear on contemporary issues. But, if I had to answer the question, the only answer I can give is that I liked school and I liked figuring things out.
Why did you decide to focus on your particular area of study?
My current work is something new for me. It is a study of the shifting ethics of foreign policy discourse in Canada during the now ended “new world order.” I am focusing on this because it seems important: how have Canadians grappled with the ethical challenges associated with violence and foreign policy? I recall, during the debate about what Canada would do with regard to Syria, someone said “we have to do something!” And, that is true. We do have to do something, but why did we choose to do the things that we did? How do we grapple with the deaths of innocents in military action? Is there an ethics that provides a morally safe place on which to stand? Is one justified in not using military options even if it ends up costing innocent lives? The evident example here is, of course, the genocide in Rwanda.
But, before this, my other works was always organized around some sort of question I had that I wanted to answer: how (or, why) did certain styles of art become popular? What factors contributed to the gendering of a modern Canadian artistic sphere? What are the limits of liberalism as a political philosophy of nation? I hope it is not just me, but I found these questions interesting and important because they opened up questions about the institutional organization of an evolving modern culture in Canada.
If you didn’t study your chosen area, what kind of history do you think you would want to do?
I answer that question differently on different days. I was recently at the Atlantic Canada Studies conference at Acadia and if I had been asked what I wanted to study, it would have been the subject matter of the previous session I attended, and then the one after that and the one after that. There are so many amazing historians working today on issues like Black refugees, Indigenous sport, public history, protest movements, human rights, and the list goes on. That is, it seems to me, the power of history: the best history does not simply present you with information or facts (however important information and facts are) but draws you into a dialogue; it urges your participation in a conversation.
But, if I had to go back and start again knowing what I know now, I’d likely spend more time reading in religious history. We’ve had a couple of waves of really good religious history. I attended Queen’s before George Rawlyk died. I knew him, although I did not take courses from him, but spent a lot of time talking to his students. They had really interesting perspectives that might be important to revisit to think about how people have understood and acted upon what they see as the spiritual dynamics of their lives.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
A centre for Montreal Alouettes. Still cheer for them.
What kind of work do you do as a historian?
All kinds. I guess I have alluded to some of the important work that I see going on in history right now and that is another thing that I really like about history as a profession: it is collaborative. Historians write their work (often) by themselves and spend a lot of time alone in the archives, but I’m so impressed with the way the current generation of historians (the historians of Unwritten Histories, and activehistory.ca, and Borealia, and Acadiensis, the Otter, etc.) work together. It is this collaboration that brings off conferences, maintains dialogues in the public sphere, and challenges us to think about how we engage new ideas or support colleagues.
What do I do specifically? I’m co-editor of Acadiensis, a member of the Editorial Committee for Findings, and a contributing editor to activehistory.ca. I’m program advisor for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison and also Canadian Studies program director. There is a lot of work to do, responding to the TRC, promoting the decolonization of campus, supporting the work of colleagues who are engaged in the same actions, and working with new colleagues as they start their academic lives. I was blessed with wonderful mentors and people who just supported me. I think it is important that people like myself pay that forward.
This past year, I sat on Mount Allison’s Budget Advisory Committee (history helps here too!), the University Senate, and the Senate Planning Committee. I maintain a semi-active role with the Canadian Studies Network (I’m on a jury for best book this year and serve on the Network’s advisory committee). We’re also talking about starting a Museum Studies program at Mount A and I’m excited about that. I spend a lot of time connecting with colleagues at other institutions, planning collaborative work, and trying to build networks that can reinforce the best of the academy and help sustain it at what is a pretty bad economic time.
One thing that takes a lot of time is “dealing with” undergraduates. I don’t say that in a negative way: as if students suck up all kinds of time or that they have some sort of entitlement mentality. I think we have a better handle on some of the problems younger people confront these days and we are taking serious steps to keep these young adults in school. It is not just a matter of saying “work harder” or “stop playing video” or “spend less time watching Netflix.” It is a matter of having the tools in place to make a meaningful different in someone else’s life.
What is the coolest and/or strangest thing you’ve ever found or learned while doing research?
I don’t think I want to say. I’ll be vague. I read a letter in which one well-known artist claimed that another well-known artist could not paint worth a damn. That was entertaining, but I guess not strange.
The coolest thing I discover might be something that is on me. I discover how aware people in the past were of the problems that affected their lives and how much they worked to changed that and build a better society.
What is your favourite part about being a historian? And what is your least favourite part?
My favourite part is that nine days out of ten; nine hours out of ten, the work I do is meaningful. I don’t say that to promote myself. I think what historians do in the classroom, on the committee, in public discourse, in the community, etc., is meaningful. While I do a lot of different things in the run of a week, the vast majority of time, I feel that this is time well spent.
Least favourite: double booking myself or not being able to get to a conference. I was reading the tweets from the CHA this year. I really regret not being there.
What is the most surprising thing you’ve ever learned about history?
Hmmm …. What surprises me is how much research changes misconceptions and presumptions. Again, this might be on me because the misconceptions to which I’m referring are my own. Every time I think I understand some historical process, or event, or someone’s motivation, research always shifts my perspective. It always shows more complexity, mixed motives, ironies, or even just my own misunderstanding of the past.
Why do you think we, as a society, should study history?
There are many reasons so I’ll highlight just a couple. (1) So that we have a sense of the how we got to here and how our society was built. This is, of course, a key element of the TRC and its recommendations regarding history. (2) If you don’t study history, someone will do it for you and their goals might be a heck of a lot less scholarly than those we find in the historical profession. As I said above, I’m concerned about the political conscription of history.
If you could go back in time, whether to live or just visit, which time and place would you pick and why?
I like living today. I’m not certain I’d want to go back into the past. Years ago I asked my grandmother about the “good old days” and she patiently explained to me that they were not very good, at least for her. She grew up in a very poor community in rural Newfoundland and her thoughts on that have always stuck with me. She liked the changes her life had gone through. She – and my grandfather – liked pensions (as opposed to working until the day you died), she liked the fact that people challenged racism, she liked the fact that young women had more options than she did. I like our time.
It might be fun to move forward in time, to sneak a peak at the future.
What is your favourite historical book/film/museum/etc, and why?
I really loved Harold Mah’s Phantasies of Enlightenment, but I also liked a whole bunch more (I loved Joy Parr’s Gender of Breadwinners, for instance, when I first read it) and I find some of the new work on the fashioning of Settler society so illuminating. Mah’s work has always made me think differently about language and about how we ask questions and make use of sources.
For a film, I’d have to say Tony Tremblay’s Last Shift, which charts the fate of a northern New Brunswick mill town after the mill closed. The film is nostalgic but I think it has a real depth in that it captures the complicated character of work, family, and community (and relations between employers and communities) before the onset of neoliberalism. It is well worth the watch. My colleague Beth Jewett arranged a screening of it at Mount A as part of a workshop we were running and I am forever grateful.
In your opinion, what is the most important event or person in Canadian history that everyone should know about?
Hopefully this will change over time. Right now, I’d argue it’s TRC, but we also need to be historians about this. We need to recognize that the TRC stands at the confluence of a range of forces. An historical perspective helps here. We need to see the TRC as one step in a long chain of movements to decolonize and we need to ask what happened to the other ones (to the Red Paper, the Penner Report, RCAP) and chart the long legal resistance of the federal state in the courts to Indigenous rights. But, by looking at the TRC as the product of a series of factors, historians can contribute to debates about the retooling of Canada and the reconstructions of relations between Settlers and Original Peoples.
Special thanks to Andrew Nurse for this great interview! Don’t forget to follow Andrew on twitter @SackvilleNB, and join us again on Friday for this month’s second edition of Upcoming Publications!
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