What is your experience as a scholar?

My family history is rooted in the history of the British Empire – Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, the British Isles, and Canada. Making sense of this history has been an important part of my work as a scholar and as an educator at UPEI. The desire to understand the complex nature of social identities and human relations is what drives my work as an historian.

As a professor and as a volunteer with high school students, I enjoy working with students to develop their writing and other communication skills. I consider written communication to be both a technical skill to master and an artform. Writing can be painful and pleasurable; at its best, writing can be deeply satisfying! 

My publications include Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930, articles and chapters in multiple journals and edited collections (including “Sex Scandals and Papist Plots: The Mid-Nineteenth-Century World of an Irish Nurse in Quebec,” Journal of Women’s History, which won a Canadian Historical Association article prize in 2016), and a booklet in the Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada Series, titled: Receiving Canada’s Immigrants: The Work of the State Before 1930.

What is your role within ACLC?

I am the Director of the Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture Program, and an Associate Professor in the History Department. As the director of ACLC, I manage the day-to-day running of the program, and I work one-on-one with students to determine programs of study that will best suit their interests and long-term career and life goals. As a history professor, I teach courses in Canadian History, Global History and the history of the Atlantic World. I am particularly interested in writing and teaching about international migrations, war and revolution, and the history of the British Empire. 

What do you like about the ACLC program?

The ACLC program provides students with a wonderful way to combine their areas of intellectual curiosity and passion with the practical knowledge and skills needed for successful employment and citizenship post graduation. My goal as the director of this program is to help more students study what they want to study, confident in the knowledge that their undergraduate education will serve them well.

Is there anything that you do outside of the university that influences what you do in the classroom?

Working in the Faculty of Arts at UPEI allows me to combine the best of many worlds, and to help my students do the same. For example, my passion for food and cooking has recently merged the kitchen and the classroom in a course called Foreign Food: Eating in the Age of Empires. So far my enthusiasm for hiking, camping and kayaking have not made it into the classroom.