2024 Fort Garry Invitational Lecture
St. John’s College, University of Manitoba
Dr. Jim Mochoruk, Reflections from a Career Teaching History
As president of the History Graduate Students’ Association, we organized a guest lecture to be our premiere academic-focused event in the fall semester. When we decided on this format, we also quickly concluded that due to the wide array of interested represented within our community, we might yield more value exploring ideas about studying history, rather than the scholarly results themselves. We invited Dr. Jim Mochoruk, who spoke to students, faculty and community members, addressing questions such as:
How has the field shifted?
What was valued when you started teaching that isn’t valued now?
What is valued now that wasn’t when you started teaching?
What are the similarities and differences in a first-year student from when you started teaching compared to today?
How have you approached managing work/life balance? What advice would you give to graduate students?
What trends in the discipline do you identify as beneficial or hazardous?
What is, and how would you assess the impact of Generative AI both in scholarly research, and the classroom?
Dr. Mochoruk’s wide-ranging lecture covered the overlap between commercial airline pilots and British Imperial history, the Luddite tendencies of historians naturally resistant to technological change, and teaching History in prison and clearly demonstrated his captivating nature as a speaker.
Below is a modified version of the introduction I delivered at the event:
This event was made possible with funding from the University of Manitoba’s Department of History, Arts Dean’s Office and the Faculty of Arts Endowment Fund.
When I became president of the History Graduate Student’s Association, we began to have conversations about what we wanted this year to look like, and what we felt was missing from the Graduate Student experience this year. My Vice President and I have both been beneficiaries of the conference experience, which often requires travelling out of town. We quickly saw many benefits in attempting a revival of the Fort Garry Lectures Graduate Student Conference. We can announce tonight that the 2024/2025 Fort Garry Lectures will take place on Friday, May 2, 2025, at St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba. In the coming weeks, we will circulate a call for senior Undergraduate and Graduate students to submit papers to present in a conference-type atmosphere. This decision, we felt, left us with an opportunity for a similar type of premier academically focused event in the fall semester, which we eventually decided should be an invitational lecture.
On to tonight’s event: Dr. Jim Mochoruk was the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Dakota. He holds a PhD and an MA from the University of Manitoba, and a BA from the University of Winnipeg. I first learned of Dr. Mochoruk when a Canadian History seminar I was taking assigned Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies, a collection that he co-edited. This work, and this class was central to challenging the notion that Canadians are generally the “Good Guys” of history. While most students dreaded Zoom seminars, I found the frequent guests stimulating.
A year or so later, I had the privilege of attending the book launch for what I consider a companion volume, For a Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers’ Revolt. I heard Dr. Mochoruk, and his co-editors, who are also here tonight, talk about how the changing demographic transitions of the history profession away from white European, upper middle-class males reflected changes in scholarship. “I mean, I remember when I was first an undergraduate women lived in boxes; workers lived in boxes; Indigenous people lived in boxes. And fortunately, now these folks are out of these boxes, and are hopefully increasingly center stage in History. These things do change over time.” This was a key insight that had a profound impact as I transitioned to higher levels of historical study.
I later found Dr. Mochoruk crossing my path in other areas. When I started to take my study of History more seriously, I joined the Manitoba Historical Society. I excitedly opened Prairie History number 10, the first edition of the MHS journal that I received as a member, and on the second page I found a two-part editorial titled: “Borderlands: An Appreciation.”, which I eagerly read, didn’t understand, but was ready to sign up for a class about anyway. When my curiosity turned to a historiographical survey of Manitoba’s North, I found Dr. Mochoruk’s monograph Formidable Heritage: Manitoba’s North and the Cost of Development.
Leaving these things behind, and beginning to think about The Fur Trade, Precarious Workers, and the role of the Hudson’s Bay Company in early 20th century Western Canadian Society, I arrived at the Provincial Archives of Manitoba last spring to find Dr. Mochoruk working diligently in the corner, on cue cards—a very different, and certainly more productive approach than I had developed, which involved my laptop, Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote, Notepad, two digital cameras, my iPhone, two SD cards, a USB key, and at least two coil bound notebooks. I began to wonder about the different experiences that a primary source might offer to historians who approach it with a notebook, as opposed to the slew of technology I had elected to use. This led me to the rant, that I’ve delivered to several of you in this room, about the impact of technology on the work of the Historian. When Dr. Mochoruk and I coincidently kept bumping into each other, the repeated “Are you sure you’re not following me?” that I would ask were a little bit more genuine than I think he realized at the time.
One thing that kept coming to mind as I struggled through a Canadian historiography class, was when shared an archival lunch break at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and Dr. Mochoruk said that there were certain concepts that he did not understand until it came time to participate in a graduate seminar, as a professor. Turns out professors are people, they do not live at school, and are prone to all the same thoughts, feelings and observations that students are, as professors were once students.
As you can see, Dr. Mochoruk is one of several people who has had a profound impact on the way that I think about the discipline of History, and I could think of no better way to come to answers to some of these questions than to simply ask. So, thank you for all joining me here today in pursuit of some of these answers, and would you please thank Dr. Mochoruk for making the journey and offering us Reflections from His Career Teaching History. Please make note of your questions, as we will save some time for a brief Q&A. Of course, we can continue this discussion as we move down the hallway for some snacks, and in the coming days. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jim Mochoruk.
