smit...@post.queensu.ca@post.ca
Geoff Smith is a native San Franciscan, but has been a card-carrying Canadian citizen since 1986. He taught at Santa Barbara and Macalester College in St. Paul MN before moving to Queen’s in 1969, where is now professor emeritus of history and of kinesiology and health studies.
Prof. Smith’s book, To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal and the Coming of World War II (1973) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history and was reissued in paperback (1992) with a new epilogue and critical bibliography. An article for Queen’s Quarterly (1989), “Historical Perspectives on AIDS: Society, Culture, and STDs,” gained inclusion in Best Canadian Essays—1990, Douglas Fetherling, ed. (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1990).
Other recent work includes “National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender, and Disease in the Cold-War United States,” International History Review (1992); “Security, Gender, and the Historical Process,” in Diplomatic History (1994); and “Peace History: A Many Splendored, Splintered Thing,” Reviews in American History (1993). He also edited and wrote an introduction for a special issue of Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research—a quarter-century retrospective on the Kent State shootings of 1970; a critical essay on changes in international sport since the end of the Second World War: “The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd?” Queen’s Quarterly (1996), and a feature essay for Diplomatic History, “Beware the Historian! Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, and the Dangers of History (1998). More recently, he contributed a chapter on Japanese-Canadian Relocation in WWII to Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America, Eds. Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels (2000); “Interrogating Security: A Life Story in History, 1941-1954,” Peace & Change (2000), reprinted in Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, eds. Gary Kinsman et al. (2000); “Nativism,” in the Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (2002); "9/11 and All That: Reflections on a Tragedy," The Undergraduate Review (2002), 56-71; “Babe Didrikson Zaharias and the Cold War Politics of Gender” in The Human Tradition in American History since 1945, ed. David L. Anderson (2003), “Containments, ‘Disease,’ and Cold War Culture,” in War and Culture in the Twentieth Century: Reflections at Century’s End, eds. Michael Hennessy and B.J.C McKercher (2003); and “Memory, Nostalgia, and the Hearts of (Mostly Male) Sport Fans,” Sociology of Sport Journal (2004).
Smith has also written on American naval history and diplomacy before and during the Civil War. Contributions include biographical chapters on Admiral Charles Wilkes, explorer and cause célèbre after the Trent affair in 1861 for Makers of American Foreign Policy: From Benjamin Franklin to Henry Kissinger (1974) and Commanders of the Old Steam Navy: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1840-1880 (1986); an article, “The Navy Before Darwinism: Science, Exploration and Diplomacy before the Civil War,” American Quarterly (1976); and a chapter titled “An Uncertain Passage: The Bureau’s run the Navy, 1842-1861,” in In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775-1984 (1978, 1984).
He also became involved in the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian redress movements in the 1980s. See “Doing Justice: Relocation and Equity in Public Policy, The Public Historian (1984), “Nativism,” in Alexander DeConde (ed.), Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (Rev. ed. 2002); “Racial Nativism and the Origins of Japanese American Relocation,” in Roger Daniels, et al. eds., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (rev. ed. 1991); and “The Japanese Canadians,” in Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels, eds., Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America (2000).
Smith’s current research includes completion of a book for Canadian Scholars/Women’s Press (Toronto), titled Contagious Subversion: Sex, Gender, and Security in the Cold War(forthcoming 2007), and work on a monograph, tentatively titled The Olympic Games in an Era of Revolution, 1964-1984. He is interested in the interplay of sport and culture in North America as well as nativism in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the play of sexuality and gender in the emergence of the national security state during the cold war. He served as President (1995-97) and Executive Secretary-Treasurer (1992-1995, 1998-2001) of the Peace History Society (formerly the Council of Peace Research in History), and he also co-chaired, with Margaret MacMillan of the Univ. of Toronto, the 26th annual meeting in Toronto (2000) of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). He also served as a member of the Board of Governors of Trinity College School in 2002-03.
Professor Smith taught courses in sport, society and culture, and on health issues in 20th century Canada and the United States, both in the School of Physical and Health Education and the History Department at Queen’s University. He has also taught courses on the history of U.S. foreign relations and security policy, the history of the Vietnam War, “Conspiracy and Dissent in American History", Latin American history, the history of American society and culture in the 20th century, drug wars and drug cultures, and postmodern views of sexually transmitted diseases in the 20th century. In 2002 he won both “Best Prof” and “Best Course” in the Queen’s Journal Readers Choice Poll, and in 2004, after many nominations, he won the Frank Knox Teaching Award, as well as the PHED Class of ’88 Excellence in Teaching Award.
He served as assistant coach and administrator for the Queen’s University men’s intercollegiate basketball team in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote a weekly column on sport and culture for the Kingston Whig-Standard (1986-1990), and produced and hosted a public affairs television show (“This Olde City, with Mr. Fix-It”) in 1997-98. In 2003-04 he served as a member of the Whig-Standard Community Editorial Board.
|
|
