A Wilder West: Rodeo in Western Canada. (UBC Press, 2011).
Mary-Ellen Kelm
Canada Research Chair & Professor
Office: AQ 6227
Telephone: 778-782-7299
Email: kelm@sfu.ca
Personal Website: aq6218.arts.sfu.ca/
Areas of Study: CANADA, AMERICAS.
Biography
Born in Windsor Ontario, Mary-Ellen moved to the west coast to do her Masters at Simon Fraser University in the late 80s. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto 1995. She received a NHRDP Post-doctoral award in 1994 which she took at the University of Northern British Columbia where she was founding faculty in the History Program. In 2006, she returned to the coast to take up a Canada Research Chair here at SFU. She and her dog Rusty can often be seen on campus, as well as on local hiking trails.
Research Interests
Kelm's work has examined the impacts of colonization on Aboriginal health and healing in British Columbia. She is currently writing a book on rodeo as an example of Bhabha's 'third space' of cultural production. In this work, she examines rodeo as a medium for cultural articulation both for Aboriginal and non-Native people in ways that impact the binaries of 'cowboy' and 'Indian,' 'authentic' and 'appropriated' as well as those of gender. Her new research returns to medical history to study the production of knowledge about Aboriginal health over the course of the 20th century.
Publications (Books)
In the Days of our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women's History in Canada (edited with Lorna Townsend). University of Toronto Press, 2006, xii +434 pp.
The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast (editor). (University of Calgary Press, 2006)
Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia (University of British Columbia Press, 1998)
Publications (Articles)
- "'We Were a Large Company of White Folk': Making whiteness, marking gender in the letters of Margaret Butcher." forthcoming in Nursing/Midwives (edited by Myra Rutherdale), McGill-Queens Press, 2006)
- "Cowboys and Indians at the Calgary Stampede: Commodity, Community and the Gender of Authenticity, 1912-1972." forthcoming in the Canadian Historical Review
- "Diagnosing the Discursive Indians: Medicine, Gender and the Dying Race." Ethnohistory 2005
- "Wilp Wa'ums: Decolonization and Nisga'a Medicine." Social Science and Medicine, 2004.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States; history of medicine; cultural studies
Notable Major Awards
- Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Standard Research Grant, 2006-2009
- Canada Research Chair (Tier II), 2006-2011
- SFU, President's Research Grant, 2006
- Sir John A Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association, 1999.
- SSHRC, SRG, 2000-200