The Executive
Penny Bryden is a Professor of History at the University of Victoria, an institution she came to in 2005, after receiving her PhD at York University and teaching at Mount Allison University for a dozen years. At Mount Allison, Professor Bryden was Head of the Department of History and Chair of the Canadian Studies Program, a member of the executive of the faculty union, and served on numerous university, faculty and departmental committees. At the University of Victoria, she has served on various faculty committees (Committee on Committees, Curriculum Committee, Dean’s Advisory Committee, Advisory Committee to the Associate Dean) and maintained an active teaching and research program.
Within the discipline, Professor Bryden has served on the executives of the Canadian Historical Association and the Association of Canadian Studies, and been President of the Canadian International Council, Victoria Branch. She was the program chair for the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting at Congress, 2013, has served for a number of years on SSHRC adjudication committees in both history and political science, and is currently a member of the Aid to Scholarly Publication Program board.
Professor Bryden’s research focuses on Canadian political history. Her most recent book, Canada: A Political Biography (2016) is a textbook for Oxford University Press. Another recent book, "A Justifiable Obsession": Ontario’s Relations with Ottawa, 1943-1985 (University of Toronto Press, 2013), examined intergovernmental relations, while her current SSHRC-funded research is a history of the Prime Minister’s Office in Canada. She has begun work on a new project on a long history of political scandal in Canada.
Steven High
Vice-President
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.
Precarious Employment & Advocacy & Publicity Portfolios
Jo holds her doctorate in Canadian history from the University of Ottawa and has been teaching part-time at the university’s History department since 1997 and more recently in the Institute of Canadian and Indigenous Studies. She teaches a diversity of Canadian and American survey history courses from contact to the present, focusing also on First Nations, Inuit and Metis experiences with an emphasis on Indigenous education and microhistory research methods. 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 also an active member of several CHA affiliated committees including the History of Children and Youth Group and the Public History Group. 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 has been learning about and working to embrace social and digital media knowledge in her research, teaching and work worlds. She recently joined the Association of Canadian Archivists as the Executive Director.
CHA Annual Meeting - Liaison with CHA Annual Meeting Program Committee & Teaching Portfolios
Marie Michèle Doucet
French-Language Secretary
Marie-Michèle Doucet received her doctorate in history at the Université de Montréal in June 2016. She completed her master's and bachelor's degree at the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick. Since September 2016, she has been Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont, where she teaches European History, Women's History and International Relations. Her master's thesis, Héros et héroïnes : Stéréotypes et représentation genrés dans la littérature patriotique de la Grande Guerre en France (1914-1919) won the Vo-Van Award for the best thesis at the Université de Moncton in 2010.
Her current research focuses on the international women's petition for disarmament of 1930-32. Taking a transnational approach, she is interested in how French, British, German and Canadian women worked towards universal disarmament after the First World War. Marie-Michèle has several publications in magazines and collective works in Europe and Canada. She also co-edited the book Le génocide des Arméniens : Traces, mémoires et représentations published in February 2017 at the Presses de l'Université Laval.
Co-Editor of the CHA magazine Intersections
Matthew Bellamy
English-Language Secretary
Matthew J. Bellamy is an associate professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa. He specializes in Canadian business and political history. He is the author of Profiting the Crown: Canada's Polymer Corporation, 1942-1990 and Canada and the Cost of World War II: The International Operations of Canada's Department of Finance, 1939-1947 (with R. B. Bryce).
His latest research has taken him into the realm of brewing history. His work on brewing has been recently published in The Walrus, Business History, and the Canadian Historical Review. He is currently working on a book-length history of the Labatt’s brewery.
Co-Editor of the CHA magazine Intersections