Steven Bednarski

Steven Bednarski (born 1973) is a Canadian historian of the Middle Ages who specializes in fourteenth-century environment, crime, sex, gender, and microhistory. He is notable for being awarded an exceptionally high level of public research funding and for piloting a trans-disciplinary international research partnership network. As a child, Bednarski also worked in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario as an actor. His most notable roles were the English voices of Astro Boy (produced by Montreal's Cinelume Studios in 1985), and Roobear in The Adventures of the Little Koala. At the time Astro Boy was dubbed from Japanese into English, Canadian voice-over regulations did not require producers to list voice actors' credits at the end of their productions. As a result, although his voice aired for over a decade and a half on TV, VHS, and DVD, he received no official recognition for his contribution and did not receive royalties.

## Early life

Steven Bednarski was born in 1973 to Anglophone parents in Montreal. His mother was a homemaker and his father a secondary school mathematics teacher. He has two younger brothers named Andrew and Robert. During his childhood, changes to the language laws of Québec meant he was part of the first generation of English-speaking Montreal school children afforded the opportunity to attend public school equally in both English and French within the then-English language Catholic School Board, the now-defunct Montreal Baldwin-Cartier English Catholic School Board. In 1989, Bednarski's family moved from the Canadian francophone province of Québec to the predominantly English-speaking province of Ontario.

## Education

Bednarski began his education in 1985 at Loyola High School, Montreal, a Jesuit private school for boys with a strong Liberal Arts tradition. At the time, the school still required students to study Latin for the first two years of their secondary school education. Subsequently, upon moving from Montreal to Toronto, he attended Glendon College, the bilingual (French and English) campus of York University, Toronto. There, he received an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Linguistics, and studied under Andrée Courtemanche, a French-Canadian medieval historian. After working with Courtemanche's historical records from Provence, Bednarski began his MA studies in the History Department at the University of Toronto on a full scholarship from the Province of Ontario. Upon graduation from this MA program, Bednarski attended the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) where he pursued doctoral studies under the co-supervision of Michel Hébert and Andrée Courtemanche. His doctoral research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). In the fourth and final year of his doctoral studies, Bednarski was invited to apply for, and subsequently received, a prestigious SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, hosted at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

## Filmography

Astro Boy (1980) (1985 english redub) as Astro

The Wizard of Oz (1986) (1987 english redub) as Tip/Ozma

The Adventures of the Little Koala (1984) (1987 english redub) as Roobear

The Adventures of Albert and Sidney (1979) (1985 english redub) as Sidney

## External links

* Steven Bednarski at IMDB
* Steven Bednarski at Twitter