Mathias Rodorff

In this episode Thomas Thurston spoke with Mathias Rodorff, a PhD candidate at the University of Munich and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, about his current work, which investigates why Nova Scotian newspapers paid such close attention to the contest in the United States over issues of slavery, emancipation, and equality while never considering how these issues might have played out in their province. Rodorff considers this in the context of other domestic events, like the heated debates over Nova Scotia’s role in the Canadian Confederation.

Mathias Rodorff studied modern history and social history at the University of Freiburg and media studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland) in a jointly delivered master degree program. He received his MA for his thesis entitled “The American Civil War in the editorials of the Globe (Toronto) and the Times (London).”

In October 2013 he joined the doctoral program of the America Institute. Since 2014 he has participated in the three-year international partnership project, “Unrest, Violence, and the Search for Social Order in British North America and Canada, 1749-1876”, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

His dissertation project focuses on how transatlantic processes interacted with local spaces in Great Britain, Atlantic and French Canada and how public communication and opinion was created during the 1850s-1870s. This project is supervised by Michael Hochgeschwender (LMU Munich) and Jerry Bannister (Dalhousie University).