Three History Students Win OGS Scholarships

Incoming MA student Lauren Rivet, Jonathan Mertz, and Graeme Sylvestre have been awarded prestigious Ontario Graduate Student Scholarships (OGS) for the 2017-2018 school year. Every applicant from the history department was successful. The scholarship defines itself as “encouraging excellence in graduate studies at publicly-assisted universities in Ontario. Since 1975, the OGS program has been providing merit-based scholarships to Ontario’s best graduate students in all disciplines of academic study.”

After earning her BA in history from the University of Windsor Lauren Rivet obtained a certificate from Georgian College. Returning in fall 2017, Lauren Rivet will bring together the skills she mastered during her courses of study. Lauren’s scholarship-winning project will be “exploring the transaction of art and artifacts from Europe to North America during the 19th and early 20th century.” She continues, “I would like to focus on creating a project dedicated to analyzing the social and cultural implications of these transactions on Canadian public institutions. I am interested in this topic because I believe that by studying the acquisition of Old Masters by public institutions will provide insight into the shaping of Canadian art and society during this time period.”

Jonathan Mertz, a SSHRC fellowship winner last year will use his grant money to support his research into political thinking in the Holy Roman Empire. Mertz, who is fluent in German and is in his second year of MA study will be writing a “macro-analysis of the Empire’s political institutions and a comparative analysis between the different socio-cultural developments within the Empire.” Especially innovative is his use of the work of postcolonial theoretical approaches to the early modern ideas of empire.

Graeme Sylvestre graduated from the University of Windsor in 2012 with degrees majoring in philosophy and history, as well as a certificate of public administration. He now returns to undertake a historical analysis of the LGBT community in Windsor by charting its development through the latter half of the twentieth century through the use of oral histories. Graeme will also pay particular attention to Windsor’s liminal position between large and active LGBT communities in Detroit and Canadian cities like London and Toronto. This work aims to reveal some of the unique aspects of the gay experience as it developed in a small, working-class, Canadian border city.