Dr Jeff Oliver has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant to carry out work on the project European migrant landscapes and intercultural relations in western Canada.
The programme of research will employ postdoctoral research fellow Dr Agusta Edwald who will work alongside the PI to help investigate interactions between different ethnic groups, which settled on the Canadian prairies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A common belief is that these colonial migrant communities were either assimilated into a broader Anglo-Canadian culture or largely resisted assimilation through maintaining their identity. This research begins with the working hypothesis that intercultural relations were creative of altogether more complex outcomes, including entirely novel ways of living, working and thinking. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective, this three-year study will examine changing material culture traditions across a range of migrant settlement landscapes. Ultimately the project seeks to understand the nature and uniqueness of local interactions and the consequences these exchanges had for social and cultural change.
Congratulations Jeff!
The Leverhulme Trust was established in 1925 under the Will of the first Viscount Leverhulme. It is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing funds of some £60 million every year. For further information about the schemes that the Leverhulme Trust fund visit their website at www.leverhulme.ac.uk / www.twitter.com/LeverhulmeTrust
Caption: Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artefacts from the Icelandic Colony, Manitoba. (Photo: Agusta Edwald).