Successful Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Proposal​

This was my successful proposal for a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2025. I hope it may be useful to anyone preparing their own proposals!

Title:

Dinosaurs in the Pocket of Big Energy: Exploring the impact of energy corporation investments in dinosaur museums on the development of Alberta’s fossil fuel industry, 1910-2015

Project description

This project will interrogate the historical co-development of Alberta’s fossil fuel and dinosaur museum industries by analysing five dinosaur exhibits funded by fossil fuel corporations between 1910 and 2015. In 2015, the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum opened in northern Alberta due in part to donations of more than $400,000 from Alliance Pipeline and EnCana, two major Albertan oil and gas corporations. In 2003, another Albertan oil and gas corporation, ATCO Ltd., donated $1,000,000 to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology to expand its premises. Nearly a century before that, the Albertan Atlas Coal Mine Company funded the creation of dinosaur gardens at the Calgary Natural History Park in 1935. Indeed, Alberta’s global reputation for dinosaur museums has been subsidized by the province’s fossil fuel industry since the Canadian Pacific Railway funded a dinosaur display in the Calgary Public Library on 16 October 1913.

The entanglement of fossil fuel corporations with dinosaur museums has significant scholarly implications across environmental studies and museum studies. Environmental scholars contend that economic factors were the driving forces behind the development of Alberta`s fossil fuel industry, yet systematic corporate investment in dinosaur exhibits over the past century suggests that societal support for fossil fuel extraction was linked to the legitimacy provided by palaeontological science. Meanwhile, attending to the complicity of natural history museums in normalizing environmentally destructive fossil fuel corporations contributes an environmental perspective to critical museum scholarship focusing solely on museums as sites of racialized and gendered discourses. These histories are therefore of great interdisciplinary importance, yet the entanglement of dinosaur museums and fossil fuel industries remains severely understudied.

I will begin this important work by blending qualitative and quantitative archival research to uncover the extent of fossil fuel investments in dinosaur museums between 1910-2015, assess the value of dinosaur museums to fossil fuel corporations, and explore the long-term impacts of fossil fuel funding on the development of dinosaur museums and natural resource extraction in Alberta. I am particularly interested in studying three specific themes: 1) the language and imagery used in dinosaur exhibits and advertising campaigns relating to extractive industries and the environment; 2) changes over time in levels of monetary and specimen donations provided by fossil fuel corporations to natural history museums; and 3) the influence of fossil fuel employees sitting on natural history museum boards of directors. By analyzing the evolution of these themes between the first dinosaur exhibit of 1913 in the Calgary Public Library and the opening of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in 2015, I will provide crucial insights into the role of fossil fuel corporations in sustaining Alberta’s dinosaur museum industry as well as the role of dinosaur museums in sustaining Alberta’s fossil fuel industry.

Theoretical approach

This project brings together three interdisciplinary theoretical elements: critical museology, capital theory, and cultural landscape theory. Critical museology is an approach within museum studies that explores how museums produce and reproduce power structures through the processes of collecting, categorizing, displaying, and narrating artefacts (Lorente 2022; Shelton 2013). Historians use critical museology to demonstrate that the very first museums were built upon looting colonial objects and displaying them as demonstrations of imperial dominance (Longair and McAleer 2016; McAleer 2014; Barringer and Flynn 1998). Critical museology has also been applied to natural history museums and dinosaur exhibits, showing how they produced and reproduced imperial power by proclaiming European domination over colonial environments and providing scientific justification to explore and dig up fossils in new lands (MacKenzie 2010; Laurence 2019; Semonin 1997). Critical museology therefore offers a valuable tool set for disentangling how museums use their collections and displays to contribute legitimacy to external power structures, and I will use this tool set to analyze how the collection and representation of fossils in Albertan dinosaur exhibits influenced the power and legitimacy of fossil fuel corporations.

Capital theory, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu, is an approach within sociology that explores how individuals manipulate personal assets for societal gain. Bourdieu argued that individuals can possess four different types of assets or “capital”: economic money or goods; cultural education or competencies; social networks or alliances; and symbolic honour or prestige (Bourdieu 1986). A crucial element of capital theory is that each form of capital can be converted into other forms of capital. This insight has been used by business scholars to develop the concept of strategic corporate philanthropy, whereby corporations use philanthropy to convert economic capital into social, symbolic, and cultural capital, not out of altruism, but as investments (Shaw et al. 2011; Gautier and Pache 2015; Harvey et al. 2019). Capital theory therefore offers a valuable tool set for theorizing the various forms of capital that dinosaur exhibitions could provide to fossil fuel corporations in return for their philanthropy, and I will use this tool set to explore how investing in dinosaur exhibitions benefited the Albertan fossil fuel industry.

Cultural landscape theory is an approach within geography for thinking about how physical lands and spaces are shaped by cultural ideas and experiences. Approaching landscapes as cultural is to see the land as actively constructed and to consider the role that representations of landscape play in defining the land and how it should best be utilized (Minca 2013; Hanson 2013). Cultural landscape theory has been powerfully used by historians to demonstrate how palaeontological knowledge of dinosaurs influenced human relationships with the environment. For example, it is argued that the settlement of arid lands in the American West was contingent upon palaeontological representations of the ancient fertility of the land (Zizzamia 2019), and that the discovery of similarities between fossils found in Britain and India justified the British occupation of India (Stafford 1990). Building upon this concept of palaeontological knowledge shaping popular understandings of the value and proper use of land, I will apply cultural landscape theory to Albertan dinosaur exhibits to explore how representations of dinosaurs influenced popular understandings of the normality and propriety of fossil fuel extraction.

Methodology

My project will focus on three sets of archival material. First, I will consult the archival records of the Calgary Natural History Museum, the Calgary Natural History Park, the Provincial Museum of Alberta, and the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, as well as available contemporary records of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum. These records include administrative meeting minutes, internal correspondence, financial records, and exhibit descriptions, all of which can be used to explore the museums’ connections with and representations of fossil fuel corporations. Second, I will trace the public reception of dinosaur exhibits using historical newspapers and travel diaries from across Alberta, which can be used to gain insight into how visitors conceptualized and responded to the relationship between palaeontology and the fossil fuel industry. Third, I will investigate the value of dinosaur exhibits to fossil fuel corporations using the corporate records of the North Western Coal and Navigation Company, the Atlas Coal Mine Company, the Canadian Pacific Railway, ATCO Ltd., Alliance Pipeline, and EnCana, placing the timing of their donations to dinosaur exhibits within the context of their contemporary business strategies. Using my extensive experience with the qualitativetextual analysis software Nvivo (Houlden et al. 2021) and quantitative financial analysis with Excel (Reid 2024), I will identify long-term patterns in interactions between these natural history museums and fossil fuel corporations concerning the collection, presentation, and interpretation of dinosaur fossils. By approaching all of these archival records through an interdisciplinary lens combining critical museology, capital theory, and cultural landscape theory, I will interrogate the extent to which dinosaur exhibits represented, supported, and contributed to the development of Alberta’s fossil fuel industries.

My research will be completed in four six-month stages, with the goal of finishing the two-year project with three submitted journal articles and a book contract. For the first stage, I will conduct a preliminary survey of primary sources, build a database of financial donations to natural history museums with Excel, and identify trends and themes across dinosaur exhibits using Nvivo. The second stage will be dedicated to drafting a new book proposal based on my preliminary findings, as well as submitting the first journal article. The third stage will conduct further primary source research, draft the first chapter of the book, and submit the second journal article, while the fourth stage will conduct yet further research, draft the second book chapter, and submit the third journal article. I will also continue presenting at two conferences per year. I completed a full draft of my PhD in two years and drafted my first monograph in one year, while also publishing fifteen journal articles, four book reviews, presenting at ten conferences, working as a research assistant and a teaching assistant, organizing two international conferences, and developing a video game, so I am confident that I can complete this ambitious project.

Significant contributions

My research will make significant interdisciplinary contributions across environmental studies and museum studies. Within environment studies, I will contribute a cultural perspective on the rise of fossil fuel industries to scholarship previously focused on economics. Environmental historians argue that market demand to fuel first trains and then automobiles was the pivotal explanatory factor behind the massive expansion of Alberta’s fossil fuel industry in the early 20th century, followed by market demand to power thermal energy plants and steel factories in the late 20th century (den Otter 1975; Watson 2016; MacDowell 2012; Dyack 1985; McIntosh and Muise 1996; Piper and Green 2017; Penfold 2016; Chastko 2021; MacFadyen and Watkins 2014). This scholarship aligns with traditional economic theories that industrial expansion is driven by relative commodity prices based on supply and demand (Allen 2009; Broadberry et al. 2015). However, this traditional focus on commodity prices is being increasingly challenged by a cultural turn in economic history emphasizing the contingency of economic growth on the expansion of social, cultural, and human capital. (Mokyr 2002; Khan 2017; Beugelsdijk and Maseland 2010). Within this cultural turn, business scholars demonstrate that modern fossil fuel corporations use philanthropic contributions to educational and cultural institutions to generate social capital and drive industry-related innovation (Bell and York 2010; Ladd 2020; Bañuelos 2021). However, none of this work has addressed either palaeontology museums, Canadian fossil fuel corporations, or historical trends and legacies. By approaching dinosaur exhibits as institutions for producing social, cultural, and symbolic capital for fossil fuel corporations, I will expand our understanding of the rise of Alberta’s fossil fuel industry as founded upon both economic and cultural factors.
Within museum studies, I will contribute an environmental perspective on the political motivations behind natural history museums to scholarship previously focused on race and gender. Museum studies scholars contend that the rise of natural history museums over the twentieth century was founded in the “New Museum Idea” of the 1890s, in which curators became determined to use their museums for the public good through education (Grande 2017; Rader and Cain 2014). Historians have attended to the shifting variety of political objectives behind natural history education over time, from disseminating racist ideas about eugenics in the early 20th century to promoting ideas of human equality and decolonization in the early 21st century (Ranger 1991; Wintle 2016). However, this work has been focused decidedly on racialized and gendered connotations, failing to capture how natural history museums have also shaped perceptions of acceptable human-environment relations. Amidst the current climate crisis, curators have increasingly moved towards using their institutions to shape public understandings of the environment (Edwards 2015; Dorfman 2017; Punzalan and Escalante 2021), yet little attention has been given to the historical role of natural history museums in normalizing the extractivist perspectives that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. By analyzing dinosaur exhibits as sites for disseminating fossil fuel corporations’ extractivist agendas, I will expand our understanding of the role of natural history museums in the evolution of human-environment relations.

Connection to past work

This project will build upon my established expertise in the history of philanthropy, public history, and historical land policies, while expanding these areas of research in new directions. The history of philanthropy has been a major strain of my PhD and postdoctoral research, through which I have studied the impact of donations to Indigenous rights and missionary organizations on Indigenous-settler relations in sites across the British empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Reid forthcoming; Reid 2024a; Reid 2023a). Historical land policies have been a major sub-focus of this work on Indigenous-settler relations, and three of my publications have explored how perceptions of land influenced struggles over land rights in British colonies (Reid forthcoming; Reid 2023b; Reid 2020). Finally, in addition to working in museums and heritage institutions in Alberta and British Columbia and studying public history at the University of Victoria, I have also recently published an article in The Public Historian on the use of video games in public history (Reid 2024b). My proposed Banting project will build on these existing focus areas by moving my study of philanthropy from Indigenous rights to corporate responsibility, my study of land from dispossession to resource extraction, and my study of public history from video games to natural history museums. Additionally, while my thesis and publications have addressed Canadian history in terms of British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec in the 19th century, this project will expand my research into Alberta in the 20th century. This project will therefore enable me to continue building my thematic areas of expertise while expanding my work into new regions, topics, and time periods.

Suitability of institution

The University of Alberta (UofA) provides the best environment for this project due to its combination of research strengths and professional development opportunities. The Centre for Teaching and Learning offers training programs on course design that will help me transition into teaching my own courses. UofA also offers valuable opportunities to engage with international and interdisciplinary researchers, particularly through conferences, workshops, and seminars hosted by the Petrocultures Research Group and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study. Moreover, I will be working under Dr Liza Piper, who is a leading environmental historian of Canada and a specialist in the history of fossil fuels (Piper 2009; Piper 2017; Piper 2007; Szabo-Jones and Piper 2015). I will further benefit from engaging with scholars from the UofA’s research specialities in palaeontology, environmental history, and public history, including environmental historian Dr Shannon Stunden Bower, museum scholar Dr Lianne McTavish, and the renowned palaeontologist Philip J. Currie himself.

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