Project PhDcast

I unlocked another level of academic nerdiness the other day! Excuse the terrible selfie– it was cold and windy and I was rushing so I wouldn’t block traffic on a road with narrow shoulders– but please enjoy this photo of my trip to the Harold A. Innis historical plaque east of Otterville, Ontario.

The truly nerdy bit is not so much that I drove over an hour to see a historical plaque (which I admit, to my non-academic friends, is kinda nerdy), but I drove specifically to see this plaque at the birthplace of famed Canadian economic historian and communication theorist Harold A. Innis (1842-1952).

Harold Innis (no relation to me) was a pretty amazing guy. He was born on a farm east of Otterville a village in Norwich Township, Oxford County that today boasts a historic mill, a historic train station, a river, and a wonderfully atmospheric rural cemetery.

I first encountered his work in a first year course on Canadian economic history way back in 2001. I thought he was kinda cool, in that way that you find it cool to learn that someone from (near) where you grew up did cool stuff and became famous. Like Harold, I grew up on a dairy farm in Oxford County. Our family farm was (is) in the north part of the county, so my life was mostly oriented towards Stratford or Woodstock. The place names in the southern half of the county are familiar to me, but they’re not places I really know. While the vibe is similar in some ways, such as village architecture, the landscape is quite different. The north feels hillier whereas the southern bit of Oxford County extends into Ontario’s tobacco belt— a stretch of sandy farmland across the north shore of Lake Erie that was, when I was a child, known for tobacco farming. You can still see the occasional collection of decaying tobacco drying sheds clustered in a field, but tobacco has been mostly replaced by other crops, including ginseng.

The Innis name popped up for me again when posts about Anne Innis Dagg (1933-2024) appeared in my Instagram feed. Harold’s daughter became a famous zoologist, spending her career researching wild giraffes in South Africa and fighting against gender discrimination in academia. Anne was awarded the Order of Canada and the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation carries on her work with giraffes. Her work has been featured in a Heritage Minutes episode, although I’ve not yet found a blue plaque for her. She is a truly inspiring woman worth a deep dive.

I re-encountered Harold when I embarked on my PhD, this time in the context of his later work on communication theory. He worked on communication theory at the University of Toronto in the 1940s, although I’ve read conflicting accounts on how much he collaborated with Marshal McLuhan, another famous Canadian communication theorist. I am determined to have at least one citation to Innis somewhere in my work, if only to have Innes citing Innis. I mean, our names are so close, I can’t not cite him, right?

I wouldn’t go so far to say Harold is an academic model or inspiration for me. But I do feel a sort of sentimental connection. Obviously, he had the privilege of being male (a definite requirement in academia back in his day) and probably a degree of luck and happenstance, to get where he got in terms of his academic work. But I think of his modest beginnings on a dairy farm and attending a small rural school. Farming was hard physical labour (and still is, although technology has changed a lot!). I imagine the commitment and sacrifice his parents made so he could follow his curiosity to Hamilton, Chicago, and Toronto. It’s never a solo journey– there are always people helping who never get the praise. I know that I am where I am in my own journey because of the support I had from my parents to pursue my own “life of the mind,” and the encouragement of past teachers, colleagues, and mentors. I have no illusion that I will have a college named after me, or a historic plaque beside my parents’ farm, but there is an encouragement in knowing that some combination of privilege, luck, hard work, and curiosity might take me places I might not yet have dreamed.

Ontario is liberally dotted with blue historic plaques placed by the Ontario Heritage Trust. In my younger days, working my first job in a new county in the early years of this millennium, I had the idea to get to know my new area by visiting historical plaques. (Kinda like this.) When I realized just how many there were, I quickly abandoned the idea! But I am still known to pull over from time to time and check one out. These days, of course, there are over a thousand and you can look up exact locations online (which is how I came across Harold’s plaque).

And, to truly prove my nerdy tendencies, I submitted the plaque as a historical site on Google Maps so my fellow academic nerds can find it more easily.