Glendon professors receive two major research grants

Despite the economic crisis and government cutbacks, Glendon history Professor Gillian McGillivray and Glendon Director of Research Alexandre Brassard are recipients of major research grants this spring.

Amid stiff competition, Professor McGillivray was awarded Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada funds for her research program Sugar and Power in the Brazilian Countryside, 1889-1964.

Left: Gillian McGillivray

“This $75,000 grant will be used to explore how sugar mill owners in the countryside managed to keep their workers and cane farmers from mobilizing from the 1910s to the 1950s, when depression, war and the struggles of workers and peasants led to revolutions and the rise of populism elsewhere in Latin America, including urban Brazil,” says McGillivray. “While Cuban, Mexican and Nicaraguan sugar workers fought violent revolutions to gain social and political rights leading to populist rule in the 1930s, rural Brazilians did not gain these rights until the 1960s.”

McGillivray is the author of the forthcoming book Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class and State-Formation in Cuba, 1868-1958 (Duke University Press).

Brassard and his École nationale d’administration publique colleague, Jean-François Savard, received a $54,000 grant from Quebec’s Secretariat for Canadian Intergovernmental Affairs to co-direct a much needed bilingual work on Quebec-Ontario relations. Titled “Ontario-Quebec Relations: A Shared Destiny?” or “Les relations Ontario-Québec: Une destiné partagée?”, this collaborative publication aims to strengthen the ties between researchers on both sides of the Ottawa River. Several Glendon faculty members have already agreed to contribute to this publication.

Right: Alexandre Brassard

Brassard is a course director in Glendon’s Department of Political Science and specializes in research methodologies, Canadian politics and the public policies of science and culture.

For more information about these professors and other Glendon faculty members, visit the Glendon Faculty & Research Web site.

Submitted to YFile by Glendon research officer Reagan Brown