Mount Royal University

Faculty Member, Humanities

Assistant Professor, History

About

Current projects:

“Uncivil Civil Subjects: Race, Reform, and Lord Durham’s 1838 Administration of Lower Canada”

Based on my doctoral research, “Uncivil Civil Subjects” uses Lord Durham’s 1838 mission to push the histories of gender/family, imperial networks, and elite politics in Canada and the British Empire in new and innovate directions. It situates Lower Canada/Quebec and the Lambton family within the global, imperial history of race, reform and rebellion; a historiography that has become in recent years saturated with studies of other imperial spaces and races. It argues that the struggle to abolish “irresponsible government” in Lower Canada must be considered alongside other political debates in Britain and its empire in the 1830s such as abolition and convict transportation.

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“Convicts, Colonists, and the Colonial Office, 1824-1841”

This project focuses on 25 Lower Canadians transported to Bermuda and New South Wales between 1824 and 1841. It uses the life histories of these men to not only shed light on their individual itineraries; it also provides new insight into the unstudied history of convict migration from Lower Canada to Bermuda and New South Wales. This study seeks to determine how colonists who became convicts in these three racially divided and hierarchical colonial societies negotiated their unfreedom during the Age of Liberty.

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“Arthur G. Doughty and the Archives of Canada’s Colonial Past”

Between 1904 and 1936 Arthur G. Doughty worked tirelessly to secure for the Public Archives of Canada a wealth of historical sources that future generations of historians could, and have since used, to write the history of colonial Canada. This project examines various “milepost” moments in the history of 19th century Canada though an analysis of the archival collections that Doughty and his staff collected and catalogued. Doughty not only paid particular attention to moments when French, English, and Indigenous peoples encountered each other, but also archived documents that contained both personal and political information, or, what he called: inner histories. Ultimately, this project illustrates the central role that archivists like Doughty played, not simply as gatekeepers of knowledge, but also as historical actors who selected for preservation the very documents that historians have used to perform their craft.

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