PhD Student Wins SSHRC Fellowship
In 2016, Michael Westcott was awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship in support of his doctoral dissertation titled “Transforming Citizenship in a British Dominion: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in the Newfoundland Home Front, 1914-1918.”
Michael's research is focused on the Newfoundland home front during the First World War. In Newfoundland, wartime measures such as food rationing; price control; prohibition; conscription; censorship; the medical care of returning veterans; and the persecution of people considered to be “enemy aliens”, altered how Newfoundlanders and Labradorians understood the relationship between citizens and the state. By referencing and utilizing files from the Center of Newfoundland Studies, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Archives, and the Manuscripts and Archives collections at Yale University Library, Michael aims to understand how Newfoundlanders and Labradorians renegotiated conceptions of citizenship during the First World War. Fundamental to these renegotiations were concepts of gender, ethnicity, and class that were reconstructed to support the war effort. Amid modern debates over Bill C-24, and the ability of the Canadian government to revoke Canadian citizenship, it is especially important to understand the complex relationship between gender, ethnicity, class and citizenship during times of war.