Through my dissertation, “A Mission to Sanitize: Public Health, Colonial Authority, and African Agency in Western Nigeria, 1900-1945,” I contribute to African history by using colonial sanitation, “native” hygiene practices, and the built environment of Nigeria as lenses to better analyze the nexus between science, medicine, and empire. I argue that the late nineteenth-century British “civilizing mission” in West Africa and the notion of the “white man’s burden” went hand in hand with a mission to sanitize the environment European colonial officials labeled “the white man’s grave.” My study shows how the development of sanitary science in Europe and the framing of certain diseases as strictly “tropical” served the British colonial interest in Nigeria, particularly in the early twentieth century. By exploring colonial public health programs that sought to transform Africans into environmentally responsible subjects, I argue that to fully grasp the processes/outcomes of the European “civilizing mission” in Africa, we also need to understand the dynamics of the British mission to sanitize the “diseased” environments that caused degeneration of white bodies in Africa. I draw from and build on the research of Africanist historians and development scholars like Marc Epprecht, whose works expand our understanding of how colonized people negotiated power and authority in the colonial context. Some of them have critiqued Maynard Swanson’s widely-cited theory of “sanitation syndrome” for oversimplifying the politics that accompanied segregated sanitation in Africa and treating Africans as objects that colonialists successfully controlled. Given the need to document African responses to and participation in the “sanitation syndrome,” my work shows how Africans turned the discourse and practice of sanitation into a contested site, preventing the European colonial practical intervention from achieving all its ambitions.

Tacit knowledge is a kind of intuitive knowledge based on intimate familiarity with the specific and multifarious components of one’s surroundings (Gascoigne & Thornton 2013). It is knowledge acquired through labour and lived experience, and it is geographically specific (White 1995). Tacit knowledge is distinct from explicit knowledge since the learning of tacit knowledge is intuitive, experiential, individual, which can make it difficult to articulate or explain.  Over the next four years, my dissertation will work to demystify tacit knowledge and its changing place in Ontario agricultural history. Since the second technological revolution that followed World War II, farming practices have been radically transformed (Duffin 2010). The use of new machines and chemicals involved a commensurate loss of tacit knowledge, which is becoming an increasingly endangered feature of contemporary agriculture. My project seeks to document changes in tacit knowledge and its uses as an important chapter in reading histories of land and land use into the history of food production. I submit that tacit knowledge is essential to understanding agricultural practice; its decline is suggestive of the shifting priorities in twenty-first-century food production systems. I aim to conduct a number of oral histories with farmers across the Southern Ontario region. My time working on farms has allowed me to experience first-hand some of these new (and sometimes old) technologies, and I have come to appreciate the type of inherent knowledge that is involved with working alongside these technologies. I have come to understand where and why manual labour is still necessary as well as gaining a “feel” for some of the agricultural tasks I was assigned. I have lived in agricultural communities my whole life, and I interact with them daily.

Kevin’s dissertation, Vital Centrism and the Political Development of Tom Kent, 1922-1968 provides a thorough biographical investigation into one of Canada’s most important liberal thinkers who would radically transform Canadian social and public policy under former Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.

Previous Education: BA University of Lethbridge, MA McMaster University

My primary areas of interest are transportation and business history with a strong focus on the smaller American automakers and how their histories can provide precedence to understand the contemporary automotive industry. I am accomplishing this through the application of economic and business theory to the histories of diverse automotive enterprises 1890-present to establish patterns within Schumpeterian Business Cycles and anticipate the future of the North American automotive industry.

Some of my recent work appeared in the Automotive History Review in the form of an article ”
Models of Automotive Firms Past and Present: Insights from Transaction Cost Economics and Industrial Theory.” I am currently developing an article on the technological development of 19th C. shipping.

My work focuses on the post-war history of Toronto’s ethnically diverse black communities. The historiography of Toronto often employs the term “Black” in a manner which homogenize disparate ethnic groups into one monolithic category. My dissertation describes how Toronto’s Black community in the post-war era shaped Toronto and address how race and ethnicity function individually and collectively to curate Black identity in Toronto.