A Cold Colonialism (2025)
A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North was published in 2025 with UBC Press. It received the 2026 Clio Prize (The North) from the Canadian Historical Association and was also shortlisted for that organization’s 2026 Best (English-Language) Scholarly Book in Canadian History.
This monograph offers the first extended examination of twentieth-century exploration in the Canadian North. Who explored the North between 1918 and 1965? What forms did exploration take? What did it mean to those affected by it? The book focuses on four representative explorers with richly documented careers: mining engineer George Douglas, surveyor Guy Blanchet, ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and filmmaker Richard Finnie. Each used exploration to grapple with key, often discomfiting aspects of modernity, including industrialization, urbanization, and the specialization of knowledge.
Despite limited experience in and knowledge of the Canadian North, these explorers helped southern militaries, industries, and governments exert control over northern peoples and lands. Each also claimed belonging in and authority over the North, speaking over people who had long resided there and better understood the region. The book suggests that the ways that explorers felt about, thought about, and moved through the North still resonate among southern settlers in Canada today.
You can read a précis of the book’s arguments here, or here. You can also listen to me chat about the book with Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen here, as part of The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk Series, and with Sean Kheraj here, on his Nature’s Past podcast.
To date, reviews of A Cold Colonialism have been published by Tyler McCreary in Canadian Geographies, by Lianne C. Leddy on NiCHE’s blog, The Otter~La loutre, by Heather Green for H-Environment, and by Cristina-Georgiana Voicu in the British Journal of Canadian Studies.
Made Modern (2018)
Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History, co-edited with Edward Jones-Imhotep, appeared in 2018 with UBC Press. It received an honourable mention in the 2019 Best Edited Collection in Canadian Studies prize competition held by the Canadian Studies Network–Réseau d’études canadiennes. A Chinese translation was published by the China Science and Technology Press in 2024.
This edited volume explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. It draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts.
You can read a précis of the book here. You can also listen to Edward and me chat with Sean Kheraj about the book on his Nature’s Past podcast, and with Carrie Lynn Evans of New Books in Science, Technology, and Society. I also spoke with Michael Robinson about my chapter in the book on his podcast Time to Eat the Dogs.
Made Modern was the subject of a roundtable review in Scientia Canadiensis, with commentaries by Elsbeth Heaman, Arn Keeling, and Sverker Sörlin. It was also reviewed by Karen Sayer for The Otter~La loutre (NiCHE) and by C. Elizabeth Koester for the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History.
Landscapes of Science (2019)
Landscapes of Science is an open-access ebook published by the Network in Canadian History and Environment in 2019. It brings together six original essays that explore the intersections of environmental history, the history of science, and the history of technology. Five of these essays first appeared as blog posts on NiCHE’s blog, The Otter~La loutre, in 2015. Revised and expanded for this collection, they are joined by an additional chapter and a new preface and conclusion.