Events

Named in honour of the late Dr. Hugh MacKinnon ("Father Hugh"), the MacKinnon Dinner is an annual event organized by the History Society, and a primary social event for all members of the department.

This year's event will be held on March 14, 2025, in the SJ2 Academic Center Atrium at St Jerome's University - 290 Westmount Rd N, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G3. Doors open at 5 PM with opening remarks starting at 5:45 PM. Dr. Rebecca MacAlpine, a History Department alumna, will be this year’s guest speaker. Dr. Rebecca MacAlpine's talk is titled: Shaming and Blaming: The Process of Proving Paternity in Seventeenth Century Somerset.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, 1298 women came before the Somerset Quarter Sessions to secure financial resources for the upkeep of their unborn children. In these records, we find marginalized voices of women silenced first by their experiences with the alleged fathers of their children and then by the courts whose objective was to avoid economic responsibility under the new Poor Laws of 1576. As a result, this process ensured that women’s voices were present but ultimately silenced. This talk will explore how we can use Quarter Session records to uncover the lived experiences of unwed mothers in early modern Somerset. It will highlight how the procedural mechanisms embedded in the Sessions further victimized unwed mothers and represents a form of institutionalized gender-based violence.

Tickets for students are priced at $25 and non-student tickets are $35.