Father Edgar Thivierge Chair in Business History at the University of Ottawa, Professor Cheryl S. McWatters is a Full Professor at the Telfer School of Management (cross appointment with the Department of History, Faculty of Arts. Dr. McWatters has a new course in the history of commerce, offered jointly with the Department of History as well as two new book projects in the fields of management accounting and commerce history. She also recently completed a Visiting Professorship in Australia. Highlights of the Thivierge Chair:

New Course:  ADM4396/HIS4141

Global Context of Business: Merchants, Traders, Capitalists and Profit Seekers is being offered jointly with the Department of History, bringing together fourth-year History majors with Telfer students. The course provides the opportunity to develop critical perspectives on the commercial and financial decisions of the past. Dr. McWatters says students of business history gain a recognition that the “problems and the decision processes seen in earlier eras of commerce — why did people invest, why did they not invest, how did they evaluate risk — were not so different from those evident today.”

Visiting Professorship, University of South Australia

Dr. McWatters was a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Australia, Adelaide in November 2014.  She presented a research workshop and met with faculty and doctoral students.  Dr. McWatters and her host, Dr. Basil Tucker, School of Commerce, UniSA Business School began a new collaboration entitled ‘What is said, and what is done: Revisiting the relationship between belief systems and informal control’.

Management Accounting in a Dynamic Environment  

This book with Prof. J.L. Zimmerman, Simon Business School, University of Rochester is a major revision of our earlier textbook to be published by Routledge later in 2015. From the Routledge website:

This book provides students and managers with an understanding and appreciation of the strengths and limitations of an organization’s accounting system, and enables them to be intelligent and critical users of the system…It prepares readers to use accounting system intelligently to achieve organizational success.

6th Annual AAHANZBS Conference, University of Sydney, ‘Perspectives in History’

This conference was hosted by the Association of Academic Historians in Australian and New Zealand Business Schools, The University of Sydney, 3rd-4th November 2014.

Along with presenting a research paper, ‘Enemy mine: merchant networks, neutrality and wartime,’ Dr. McWatters was part of a plenary session titled: ‘Why History Matters?  - An Editors Perspective’: John Shields (Labour History, University of Sydney), Cheryl McWatters (Accounting History Review, University of Ottawa)

Mercantilism, Account Keeping and the Periphery-Core Relationship

Based on extensive archival research, this essay collection examines the impact that merchant trading companies had on indigenous populations and peripheral countries. It will be of potential interest to historians, economists and sociologists who share an interest in the study of exchange networks and the theme of periphery-core relations. The book is forthcoming in 2016 from Pickering & Chatto Publishers, London, UK.