By sookie from Vancouver, Canada (CMC Ottawa Uploaded by Skeezix1000) CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
As many of you already know, on July 1st of this year, Prince Charles officially opened the new Canadian History Hall, at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa. Taking over five years to plan and execute, the Hall is the largest exhibition on Canadian history ever produced and includes 1,500 artefacts in 4,000 square metres, covering 15,000 years of history. Of course, since I live in BC and airfare is obscenely expensive, I likely won’t have the chance to visit any time soon. But thankfully, I have some absolutely amazing friends! Today’s guest post features the lovely and talented Elizabeth Della Zazzera. Elizabeth and I met back in grad school at UVic, when we were both wee little baby historians. When I found out that she had visited the Hall on a recent trip to Ottawa, I asked her to write a review for Unwritten Histories, and, of course, she was gracious enough to agree (even though she’s in the process of moving)! Enjoy!
Elizabeth at the old Canada History Hall!
Elizabeth Della Zazzera only discovered how Canadian she was when she moved to the United States in 2009. There, she received her PhD in Modern European History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France whose work emphasizes the intellectual history of material texts and urban environments. Her current project “Romanticism in Print: Periodicals and the Politics of Aesthetics in Restoration Paris,” examines the role played by the bataille romantique—the conflict between romanticism and classicism—in French political life in Paris between 1814 and 1830. She is excited to return to Canada this fall as the Margaret and Wallace McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University
