E-mail:  lorne.beswick@queensu.ca
Phone: 613-533-2150
Fax: 613-533-6298

Education

Bachelor of Arts (Honours), Trent University, 2010
Master of Arts, Queen's University, 2011

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About

In broad strokes, my research will be a transnational reconnaissance of radical and political movements during the early twentieth century, with an eye to how they became informed and understood questions of birth control, contraception and eugenics. This undertaking will be an organic extension of my cognate, "'Birth Control or Red Regime': Toronto, Eugenics and the Eastview Birth Control Trial," but with a much wider purview. My doctoral research, at least at this preliminary stage, will examine Canada, northern Europe and the United States, concluding at the end of the Interwar period. This early survey of the historiography has left me to wonder if birth control truly was primarily the domain of radicals, leftists and neo-Malthusians, or if it had a much wider audience. Was contraception viewed as the thin edge of the eugenic wedge, or did its advocates believe it to be another movement entirely? Answering questions such as these will aid in our understanding of how contraception and the eugenic sciences unfolded in the early twentieth century, in addition to highlighting how they may have bolstered both local and international consensus along lines inexorably tied to gender, race and class. This thesis will be carried out under the supervision of Dr. Ian McKay.