Roundtable Discussion

To register for the Roundtable Discussion and the Three Minute Thesis Competition, please click on the link below:

Registration

Moderator for Panel Discussion

Carla-Jean Stokes

Carla-Jean received her Masters of History at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011 and went on to receive a Masters of Photographic Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University in 2015. In the same year, she won the Photographic Historical Society of Canada thesis prize for her paper, “British Official First World War Photographs, 1916-1918: Arranging and Contextualizing a Collection of Prints at the Art Gallery of Ontario.” She gives lectures on war photography, and curated the exhibition, “14-18: The First World War Illustrated,” in Vernon, BC, from May 13-September 30, 2018.

In 2021, we were delighted to have Carla-Jean join our committee for strategy and planning for the History Symposium. You can watch Carla-Jean’s excellent presentation for our 2021 conference here

Academic Judges & Panelists

Megan Hamilton

Originally from Vernon, British Columbia, Megan Hamilton is a social and military historian of the 20th century. She has an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Waterloo. Her federally-funded master’s research focused on the Canadian experience of the Second World War, specifically the Vernon Military Camp. Megan’s work has been published by a number of platforms and in 2022 she won the Tri-University History Program’s top essay prize for master’s students.  Megan won the inaugural Three Minute Thesis Competition hosted by the History Symposium. You can see the competition here.

She is currently located in London, England, where she has begun a fully-funded PhD at King’s College London and the Imperial War Museum, supervised by Dr. Jonathan Fennell. Her dissertation is a study of Second World War army training across the Commonwealth.

Cynthia Comacchio

Cynthia Comacchio, Professor Emerita, Wilfrid Laurier University (2022), taught Canadian history at Laurier for nearly 40 years. She is the author of ‘Nations Are Built of Babies’: Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children, 1900-1940 (1993); The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850-1940 (1996); The Dominion of Youth: Making Modern Adolescence in English Canada (2016). She has just finished, with Neil Sutherland, ‘Ring Around the Maple:’ Children and Childhoods in Settler Canada, 19th-20th Centuries. (2023). 

Mike Bechthold

Mike Bechthold holds a PhD in History from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia and an MA & Honours BA from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Mike is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles. His most recent monograph is Flying to Victory: Raymond Collishaw and the Western Desert Campaign (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) and he is the co-author of a series of guidebooks about the Canadian battlefields of the Second World War. He specializes in the fields of military air power (especially tactical air operations in the First and Second World Wars), the Canadian army in Normandy and Northwest Europe, and the Canadian Corps in the Great War. He has taught history at Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Conestoga College, and the Schulich School of Business at York University. For 22 years Mike worked as the Communications Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies and the Managing Editor of Canadian Military History, an academic quarterly journal. Mike is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK, a Fellow of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, a Research Fellow at Nipissing University Centre for the Study of War, Atrocity, and Genocide, and he recently served as the Executive Director of the Juno Beach Centre Association. Mike is currently employed as a historian with the Royal Canadian Air Force History and Heritage section.