History Personnel
Teaching - Fall/Winter 2023-24
HIS 3797F - Selected Topics in International or Comparative History: Guns, Slaves, and Steel: Networks of Power
Michael Feagan
- Assistant Professor
Telephone: 519-661-3645
Email: mfeagan@uwo.ca
Office: 2237
Office Hours: Fridays at 2:30pm
Research Interests
Professor Feagan's current research focus is on Canadian and American telegraph operators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research and work are primarily concerned with the connections between technology and labour and how that history can inform our current relationships with technology and work. He has also written and presented on topics involving the history of telephone poles, office equipment, and Morse code.
Teaching Philosophy
Professor Feagan's goal when teaching history is to help students become better critical thinkers and more historically literate people than they were before enrolling in his class. He want his students to feel comfortable asking and answering deep historical questions. He designed his courses and his lessons around big questions. Some of the major questions that drive his courses include: does technology and science drive history? Does human behaviour and choices drive technology and scientific discovery? What do we mean when we say “progress”? How and why have certain people and places experienced imperialism differently? How were colonized bodies connected to larger imperial networks? Framing courses around big questions helps to provide students with interesting and novel ways to engage with the past and is one way he helps students engage with history. Ultimately, his goal is to get students to see the field of history as something more than just the study of past dates and events, but as an evolving discourse rooted in research and competing interpretations.
Selected Writing and Presentations
Books Reviews
Michael Feagan, Feagan on Swoch, ‘Wired Into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier’, H-War, November 2022.
Conference Talks and Presentations
“STOP: A Morse Code Mystery”, McCaffrey Seminar Series, University of Western Ontario, February 2, 2023
“A Better Class of Working Girls: Intersections of Class and Gender in Canadian Telegraph Operators, 1880-1910”, Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, November 20, 2021
“A Better Class of Working Girls: Intersections of Class and Gender in Canadian Telegraph Operators, 1880-1910”, Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association, November 5, 2021 (Awarded the CSTHA Best Student Presentation Award)
“Electric Trees: The Constructed Nature of Utility Poles and Street Trees”, Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, July 22, 2021
“Precarious Professionals: The Liminal Identity of Canadian Telegraph Operators, 1880-1914”, McCaffrey Seminar Series, University of Western Ontario, September 12, 2019
Non-refereed Articles
Michael Feagan, Another Day at the Office: How the Filing Cabinet Facilitated the Growth of Corporate Bureaucracies, CSTHA, September 10, 2021.
Michael Feagan, Telegraph Schools: The Development of Technical Education in Canada. CSTHA, August 20, 2021.
Michael Feagan, 175 Years of Telecommunications: The Origins of the Electric Telegraph in Canada. CSTHA, August 6, 2021.
Michael Feagan, Creating the Electric Tree: Conflict and Compromise. CSTHA, July 30, 2021.
Michael Feagan, Creating the Electric Tree: Physical Limitations of Telephone Poles and Wires. CSTHA, July 16, 2021.
Michael Feagan, Creating the Electric Tree: The Choice of Tree and Wood for Canadian Telephone Poles. CSTHA, July 2, 2021.
Michael Feagan, Electric Trees: The Constructed Nature of Utility Poles and Street Trees. NiCHE, July 16, 2020.
