“Meet the Members of Our New NiCHE Editorial Team!”
The Otter, Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), November 2021.
“For the first time, in 2022, we are expanding our editorial capacity beyond the executive and welcoming an additional nine members to our Editorial Team! Also for the first time, we are bringing folks in from outside Canada to recognize the global reach of our website. With these additional editors, we now have an editorial group of 22 members, potentially doubling our editing capacity going forward! With this influx of new talent we hope to […]”
NiCHE Conversations 2.4: White Ghosts and the Transmission of Whiteness on the Land with Caroline C.E. Abbott
NiCHE Article Discussed: “The Trouble on Hell Hollow Road: White Ghosts, Maternal Grief, and the Gendered Fragility of American Park Mythology” by Caroline C.E. Abbott with Dr. Jessica DeWitt via Nature’s Past. October 2021.
The Trouble on Hell Hollow Road:
White Ghosts, Maternal Grief, and the Gendered Fragility of American Park Mythology. The Otter, Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), Parks and Profit Series, Ed. Dr. Jessica DeWitt. June 2021.
“Buried beneath dead leaves off Hell Hollow road in Voluntown, Connecticut, the remnants of an empty grave lie intentionally unmarked for their own protection. A drive down the single-lane park road in the darkening days approaching Halloween is something of a rite of passage among youth in the state’s northeastern “Quiet Corner.” It is a pilgrimage which endures the legacy of an underlying, occult story. Hell Hollow road, they say, is haunted by the ghost of Maud—a malevolent, centuries-dead witch so evil her body was rejected from her family’s established plot. Unfit to rest alongside the more honourable, she was buried alone in what is now Pachaug State Forest, one of Connecticut’s 139 public state parks. She hunts the park road seeking revenge for her ostracisation; her spirit, a harbinger of doom and damnation, holding the ground to which her bones were allegedly outcast over a century ago.
At least, this is how the story goes.”
“The Purity of an Untarnishable World”:
the ‘Periodical’ Exportation of Masculinity and the Gendering of Canada’s Northern Frontier.” Congress 2021; Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC). June 2021.
“Experiential, sensationalist accounts of Canadian territories are heavily present in the American and British periodical presses of the long nineteenth century, but an exploration of the way these depictions are gendered does not satisfactorily exist. Regardless of the potential to anthropocene study, the environmental humanities have extended minimal acknowledgement to the role of periodicals in delivering an experience of environment to the middle class. Explorations of gender within this context are equally sparse. Though the need for scholarship in both of these areas is critically-acknowledged, the need for their overlap is not, severely limiting scholarly potential. The prolific representations of Canadian “frontiersmanship” in British and American periodicals are heavily gendered, and so, offer a vehicle not only effective in bridging existing research gaps, but critical to scholarly understanding of the role of international media in shaping Canadian environments. This study will explore the role of the nineteenth century periodical press in commodifying a masculinised experience of northern Canadian ecologies. It will analyse selections from popular periodicals in the final decade of the nineteenth century to cement basis in existing scholarship (Harper’s, Harmsworth, etc), and consider the role of international perspectives in shaping gendered, cultural mythologies of Canada’s northernmost environs.”