Digital history

Olive Wilcox, 1945. Library and Archives Canada, Richard Sterling Finnie fonds, e011504917.
Digital editorial work

I have done substantial digital editorial work throughout my career, much of it for the Network in Canadian History and Environment. Their blog, The Otter~La loutre, provides a platform for emerging and established Canadian environmental historians and historical geographers to share their research.

I have commissioned and edited ten special series for The Otter~La loutre since 2015:

  • “Succession IV: Queering the Environment – Queer Joy” (2026, co-edited with Jessica DeWitt and Sarah York-Bertram), on queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings;
  • “The Place Where You Live” (2024, co-edited with Tina Loo), in which graduate students at SFU and UBC each reflect on places of special concern to them in the past, present and future;
  • “Eddies” (2020), in which I chatted with NiCHE’s editors about research, teaching, and/or academia more generally during the first months of the pandemic, as a means of overcoming isolation and reaffirming environmental historical community;
  • “Canopy” (2019), a series of interviews with leading Canadian environmental historians about the field of environmental history and their journeys through it.
  • “Rhizomes” (2017–2021), a series of interviews with Canadian environmental historians working beyond the professoriate;
  • “Hope and Environmental History” (2017), based on a panel I organized for the 2017 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History;
  • “A Cold Kingdom” (2016), a “found” series on winter in Canadian history;
  • “(Un)Natural Identities” (2016), on environmental history and the histories of gender and sexuality;
  • “When Blue Meets Green” (2015), on environmental history and labour and working-class histories;
  • “Landscapes of Science” (2015), on environmental history and the histories of science, technology, and medicine.

I currently serve as one of the editors of H-Environment Roundtable Reviews, which aims to foster conversations among scholars about recently published books in the field of environmental history. I have commissioned, edited, and introduced the following roundtables to date:

In 2016, with four fellow blog editors, I co-authored an article about Canadian history blogging and its influences to date upon scholarship, teaching, and service in the historical profession in Canada. You can download a copy of this article here.

From 2013 to 2017, I also sat on the editorial board of Findings/Trouvailles, the blog of The Champlain Society. Findings/Trouvailles offers researchers the opportunity to explain how a fascinating object or document they have found in the archives can shed new light on Canadian history.

Select digital publications