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

Steven High is Professor of History and co-founder of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (storytelling.concordia.ca). Originally from Northern Ontario, he completed his MA at Lakehead (1994) and his PhD at Ottawa (1999), both in History, before undertaking postdoctoral studies at Memorial. High first held a position at Nipissing before moving to Concordia in 2005 as Canada Research Chair in Public History. He is a transnational historian specializing in oral and public history, working-class studies, and forced migration. From 2005-2012, he led Montreal Life Stories, a large-scale project with survivors of mass violence that produced a wide range of public outcomes. Much of his research is undertaken in partnership with community organizations.

His first monograph, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt (UTP, 2003) earned multiple awards including the Albert Corey Prize from the CHA/AHA. He followed this up with five others, including Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (with David Lewis, BTL/Cornell, 2007), Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere (Palgrave, 2009), Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Displacement and Survival (UBC Press, 2014; Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2018 – Clio Québec Prize), Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (with Liz Miller and Ted Little, UBC Press, 2017), and One Job Town: Work, Belonging and Betrayal in Northern Ontario (UTP, 2018 –Clio Ontario Prize and Fred Landon Prize from the Ontario Historical Society). He has also produced audio walks, digital tools, web-platforms (https://livingarchivesvivantes.org/), and writes regularly for the Montreal Gazette and Le Devoir.

Portfolio: Advocacy

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