The CHA Executive

Donald Wright is a historian of twentieth-century Canada with a special interest in Canadian historical writing. He is the author of The Professionalization of History in English Canada and Donald Creighton: A Life in History, a finalist for the Canada Prize. In 2020, he published Canada: A Very Short Introduction as part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series. He is currently writing a SSHRC-supported book about Ramsay Cook and the writing of Canadian history in the second half of the twentieth century. Wright has co-edited the Journal of Canadian Studies and Acadiensisand he was the book review editor for the Canadian Historical Review. An active member of the CHA, he served on the executive as English-language Secretary; he co-edited the CHA Bulletin (now Intersections); he chaired the program committee of the 2011 annual meeting; and he sat on a handful of prize committees, including the Garneau Medal Committee. Donald Wright lives in Fredericton with his family and their two Labrador retrievers, Bruce and Flirt. He trail runs in the summer, cross-country skis in the winter, and listens obsessively to podcasts year round.

History Campaign Committee, TaskForce on the Future of the PhD in History Implementation.

Portfolios: Advocacy,  Teaching Committee

Colin Coates currently teaches Canadian Studies and History at the bilingual Glendon College campus of York University and is an award-winning historian of early French Canada as well as Canadian environmental and cultural history. His published works are too many to mention, but include the recent co-edited collections The Nature of Canada (UBC Press, 2019), Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History (University of Calgary Press, 2016), Canadian Countercultures and the Environment (University of Calgary Press, 2016) and Introduction aux études canadiennes: histoires, identités, cultures (Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2012). Coates has also been a leading advocate for the field of Canadian Studies throughout his career and, to that end, is the Past President of the Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d’études canadiennes and was the director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies between 2011 and 2015.

Portfolios: Liaison with the Nominating Committee, the François-Xavier Garneau Prize

Jo holds her doctorate in Canadian history from the University of Ottawa and teaches part-time at the university’s History department.  She teaches a diversity of Canadian and American undergraduate survey history courses and fourth year seminars that focus on archives, decolonization, gender, and material history. She has served as a Board Member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and as a SSHRC program committee member. She is currently on the Board of the Costume Museum of Canada, is an active member of the CHA and its affiliated committees, and has supported the CHA Teaching Blog since it started. Her current academic research focuses on the ways historians and researchers can use hair to learn more about the construction of gender and growing up in a North American context.

Since 1987, Jo has worked as a researcher, historian and consultant in Ottawa, merging her knowledge of public and private research projects while maintaining ties, memberships and relationships with the academic community. She was the Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Archivists from 2017 to 2023 and will start as the Executive Director of the Canadian Council of Archives in August 2023.

Alexandre Dubé is a regular professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, where he teaches the history of Canada, New France and the Atlantic world. Holder of a PhD in history from McGill University, his interests include political history, the history of the State, political economy and material culture. A former fellow at Caltech University (2016-2017), he taught for many years at Washington University in Saint-Louis. His research has also earned him a postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the John Carter Brown Library.

His publications focus on the political culture of French Louisiana and the governmental and administrative practices of the French empire. His current projects focus on the notion of political and colonial dependence in the 18th century, as well as on the dissemination and promotion of public history.

Portfolios : Publications, Outreach to Francophones.

Amanda Ricci is an assistant professor at the Glendon Campus of York University. After undergraduate studies at Queen’s University, she completed her master’s degree at the Université de Montréal. In 2015, she defended her dissertation on the feminist movement in Montreal (1960-90) in the Department of History at McGill University.  From 2016 to 2018, she was a Wilson Fellow at the LR Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. At McMaster, her research focused on Canadian women and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975-1985.

Amanda Ricci is currently working on her first manuscript on the resurgence of feminist activism in Montreal. Her next project will focus on the history of the garment industry in the same city.

Portfolio: EDI Committee