As of 1 September 2025, I am a Professor of History and the L.R. Wilson Research Chair in Leadership and Civic Engagement at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario). Prior to this appointment, I was Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada). I have served as Department Chair, Graduate Chair, Undergraduate Chair, Associate Dean (Undergraduate Programming, Teaching and Learning, and Student Experience) and Dean pro tem in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Canadian women’s and gender history, histories of social protest, the history of the 1960s, feminist theory, and gender studies. I am currently accepting graduate students interested in Canadian women’s and gender history.
Research and Publications
My research projects are wide-ranging but are fundamentally connected to questions of citizenship, equality and rights, and social activism. I have published widely on the impact of unemployment in the Great Depression and the emergence of the gendered welfare state; women’s political activism from the 19th century to the 1940s; and peace and anti-war movements of the 20th century. My current research is on the history of the Vietnam war and the transnational politics of the draft resistance and antiwar movements in North America. I co-edited a collection (Feeling Feminism) on the emotional history of second wave feminism in Canada with Catherine Gidney and Michael Dawson. My 2020 book on the history of the suffrage movement in British Columbia (A Great Revolutionary Wave) received the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia and the Canadian Historical Association Clio Prize for British Columbia.
I was awarded the Dean’s Medal for Excellence in Academic research, teaching, and service (Simon Fraser University, 2015); the National Capital Committee on the Scholarship, Preservation and Dissemination of Women’s History, Marion Dewar Prize, 2011 [Outstanding scholar based on record of research, teaching and administrative work]; Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Cormack Teaching Award, 2010-11; and Honourable Mentions from the Canadian Historical Association (2010) and the Canadian Women’s Studies Association (2011) for Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in Ontario’s Great Depression (UTP, 2009).
- Heroes, Havens, Cowards: Gender and the Politics of Vietnam Antiwar Resistance (In Progress)
- Feeling Feminism: Second Wave Feminism and the History of Emotions. Edited with Catherine Gidney and Michael Dawson. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022.
- A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2020.
- Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2016). Co-edited with Tamara Myers and Adele Perry.
- Worth Fighting For: War Resistance in Canadian History from 1812 to the War on Terror Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2015. Co-edited with Catherine Gidney and Michael Dawson.
- Gender History: Canadian Perspectives (Oxford: 2014). Co-authored with Willeen Keough
- Debating Dissent: Canada and the 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Co-edited with Dominique Clément and Greg Kealey.
- Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in Ontario’s Great Depression (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
Upcoming/Recent Talks
Café Minerva was a free gender and women’s history group which held public events on women’s history in Vancouver, British Columbia until 2020. It was organized by Dr. Willeen Keough (Department of History, Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Lara Campbell (Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, SFU). Check out our website at http://cafeminerva.weebly.com and follow us on twitter @Cafe_Minerva