Post Doctoral Fellow 2021

Dr. Dale Barbour, a graduate of the University of Manitoba/University of Winnipeg Joint Master’s Program, received his PhD in history from the University of Toronto in 2018. Barbour’s scholarship pulls together gender, leisure, urban, and environmental history approaches to examine how people find and create recreation spaces. His master’s thesis, Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967, was published by the University of Manitoba Press in 2011 and used oral history to recreate the experience of travelling, playing, and staying at the lakeside resort. Barbour’s doctoral dissertation, Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850–1935 is set for publication this fall. It steps further back in time to consider how Torontonians chaffed at efforts to create the beach as a new form of public space in the nineteenth century and examines people in the city romanticized the experience of skinny dipping in the city’s Don River and “the boys” into pre-industrial folk figures to soften the edges of modernity. The H. Sanford Riley Postdoctoral Fellowship in Canadian History will enable Barbour to start two new projects; the first is an environmental and social history of Winnipeg relationship with the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, the second is a collaborative Winnipeg historical atlas that combines maps, pictures, and historical scholarship to walk readers through the environmental, urban, and social history of Winnipeg.