I completed my doctorate in the History Department at McGill University in 2007, following graduate studies at McGill (MA, History, 2001), York (MA, English Literature, 2000) and undergraduate work at McGill (BA, 1999). After that I taught History, Sociology, and Political Science at institutions including McGill, Bishop’s University, and the University of Ottawa, where I continued to hone a research agenda focused on the historical dimensions of social movements and governance. I began teaching at Selkirk College in 2016, where I teach courses on History and other subjects while taking advantage of the opportunity to escape to the West Kootenay’s unique and still relatively wild inland temperate rainforest environment.
My current research focuses on the evolution of the animal protection movement, a term that brings together the overlapping worlds of animal welfare and animal rights. That work emerged from a longstanding interest in the intersection of civil society and state formation in the context of nineteenth-century social movements and their capacity to shape state legislation, policy, judicial and enforcement activities, and an even lengthier engagement in environmental issues. In Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840-1914 (UBC Press, 2013) I brought those issues to bear on the unique system of wildlife conservation that emerged in Quebec during the nineteenth century, which involved the entrenchment of a distinctly patrician vision of wildlife management that reflected strategies as akin to feudal Europe as they were to the modern sport-based approaches that were to develop across North America.
Always in the background to that project was the contemporaneous development of the animal protection movement in Canada, to which I turned in a number of subsequent articles; and the evolution of environmentalism in Canada, which drew me to developments located on the cusp of what historians refer to as ‘second wave environmentalism’ in the context of the 1970s and beyond. There, my work on the Resources for Tomorrow conference in Canada underscores the establishment of what would become some of Canada’s key environmental NGOs, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and the Canadian Wildlife Federation, while my discussion of the successful campaign against the construction of “Village Lake Louise” in Banff National Park in the early 1970s highlights the values, the strategies, and the tensions that shaped the onset of second wave environmentalism in Canada during that period.
While working on those projects I invariably turned in other directions, addressing issues including foxhunting, cyclists’ rights, counterculture politics, and human-animal relations. My current research addresses the animal protection movement in its broader contexts, including that of New York, while I continue to pursue a variety of projects on environmentalism and other social movements.
