About our faculty
Our Core Faculty
David Dean specializes in public history, museums, theatre, film, and performance as well as British history. He has published many articles, co-edited History, Memory, Performance (2015) and is editor of the forthcoming Companion to Public History. On the steering committee of the International Federation for Public History, he is co-editor of their new journal, Public History International. David is co-director of the Carleton Centre for Public History and led the Workers’ History Museum’s Ottawa2017 project Capital History Kiosks.
Audra Diptee specializes in Caribbean and African history, humanitarianism and human rights, children and childhood, slavery and human trafficking, race, memory, critical applied history and historical consciousness. The author of numerous articles, she co-edited Remembering Africa & Its Diasporas: Memory, Public History & Representations of the Past (2012) with David V. Trotman. Audra is the founder and curator of History Watch which brings together an international network of activist scholars committed to public engagement.
Jennifer Evans researches the history of sexuality and visual culture, especially the role of photography and social media as agents of historical meaning. She has published extensively in these areas including Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (2011), co-edited The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and 20th Century German History (2017) and the forthcoming co-written Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape. She curates the Hate 2.0: Combating Right-Wing Extremism in the Age of Social Technology” research blog
Shawn Graham was trained in Roman archaeology but has become over the years a digital archaeologist and digital humanist. He keeps an open lab notebook of his research and experiments in digital history and archaeology at his research blog, www.electricarchaeology.ca and a more experimental one at http://smgprojects.github.io/.
He is the founder and editor of the open access journal, Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology. He co-wrote Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (2016).
Paul Litt teaches and publishes on late twentieth-century Canada with special interests in public history, cultural policy, Canadian nationalism and the 1960s. His publications include the award winning Trudeaumania (2016) and his currently investigating the origins and development of the Ontario heritage establishment in the 1950s and 1960s. Paul has worked as a public historian for the Ontario Heritage Foundation, as a freelance historian leading research teams that produced histories for corporations and public agencies, and has policy experience at the Ontario Ministry of Culture.
James Opp is a 20th-century Canadian historian researching the history of photography, archives, public memory, gender and the history of the body, visual culture, digital history, religious history, and the history of the Canadian West. The author of many articles on public history, Jim co-edited Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada (2010) with John Walsh. A former co-director of the Carleton Centre for Public History, he led the team which developed the Rideau Timescapes digital app which won the public history prize of the Canadian Historical Association in 2015.
Monica Patterson is co-editor of several articles and two books: Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011) and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline (2011). Currently, she is working on a manuscript that examines the multiple and contested understandings of childhood in late-apartheid South Africa. Monica is an investigator on the SSHRC-funded Partnership Development project, “Thinking through the Museum: Difficult Knowledge in Public” and from 2018 will be coordinator of Carleton’s new Diploma in Curatorial Studies.
Anne Trépanier is an historian born in Québec city, and associate professor in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies. A builder of intellectual and cultural bridges between the two solitudes, Anne researches, publishes and teaches on Quebec, its society and myths, its distinctions, its literature and its tensions. She has just completed a manuscript on historical representations of Confederation before 1867. Anne is currently based in Rome, Italy.
John Walsh specializes in Canadian history, space and place, governmentality, epistemology, and maps and mapping. He co-wrote Home, Work, and Play: Situating Canadian Social History third edition (2015) with James Opp and together they also edited Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada (2010). John was co-ordinator of the MA in Public History between 2013 and 2017 and is co-director of the Carleton Centre for Public History. John is the Ottawa co-ordinator of the SSHRC funded project Lost Stories Project curating From the North to the Southway Inn.
Adjunct and Associated Faculty
Ian Badgley has more than 40 years of experience in the planning, development and management of cultural heritage projects, with specialization in archaeological resource management. Since 2009 he has been the Archaeologist of the National Capital Commission’s Heritage Program responsible for developing and conducting numerous archaeological resource management projects throughout Quebec, Ontario, the eastern Arctic and Subarctic and, more recently, the National Capital Region.
Andrew Burtch is the Canadian War Museum’s post-1945 Historian. As curator of Gallery 4: A Violent Peace, he is responsible for all questions relating to conflicts from the beginning of the Cold War to the present day. He has worked to develop temporary and permanent exhibitions about the Afghanistan war, the Cyprus peacekeeping mission, the Korean War, military medicine, and war and media. His book Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’s Cold War Civil Defence received the 2012 CP Stacey Award for military history.
Janice Cavell works in the Historical Section, Global Affairs Canada, where she edits the series Documents on Canadian External Relations and does research on the history of Arctic sovereignty and other foreign policy issues. Her research interests also include the cultural history of Arctic exploration (with an emphasis on nineteenth-century print culture) and the role of women in polar exploration.
Sean Graham specializes North American media, broadcasting, and culture. He has written about the early Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, gender in 1930s radio, and the North American media environment. In addition, he has written Lace Up! A History of Skates in Canada (2017) with Jean-Marie Leduc. Shawn is an editor at Activehistory.ca where he is the host/producer of the History Slam Podcast.
Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers, and author of nine award-winning and award nominated best-selling books of literary non-fiction, most recently Who Do We Think We Are? 150 Years of Imagining Canada (2016). Educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she has worked as a magazine editor and newspaper columnist, book reviewer, and political commentator before turning to biography and popular history. Her book on the Klondike gold rush was adapted by the Discovery Channel’s miniseries Klondike and her biography of Alexander Graham Bell was turned into a miniseries, Wire Men, by White Pine Pictures.
Andrew Horrall is senior archivist at Library and Archives Canada and an historian of nineteenth and twentieth century British popular culture. He is currently researching the globalisation of British popular culture from 1850-1920, and working on the influence of British comedy in the 1960s.
Matthew McKean is Associate Director of Education at the Conference Board of Canada. He directs the research program and leads stakeholder relations for a multi-year initiative that examines the advanced skills and education challenges facing Canada today. Prior to joining the Conference Board, Matthew worked in policy, communications, stakeholder and government relations at the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. While there he led a public history project, documenting the Federation’s 75-year history.
Jean-Pierre Morin is staff historian for the department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, specializing in the history of treaties and government policy and administration. In recent years, he has worked at developing new interactive digital historical learning tools, web content and digital media as well as leading the ongoing national commemoration initiatives such as the bicentennial of the War of 1812 and the 250th anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. In 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 he was Public Servant in Residence at Carleton’s Department of History. Jean-Pierre is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council on Public History.
Michael Ostroff is a contract instructor in the Department of History. A documentary filmmaker for more than 40 years, his early works –– made in collaboration with advocacy groups, cultural organizations, poverty groups, health care providers and trade unions ––explore issues related to social change. The later documentaries focus on the history and development of Canada’s cultural voice and have been cited for their political insight, and understated, lyrical tone.
His last feature-length film, “Winds of Heaven Carr, Carvers and The Spirits of the Forest”, has been described as “…one of the best films ever made about our province, these forests, and our history as newcomers.”
Joan M. Schwartz was a specialist in photography acquisition and research at the National Archives of Canada for more than two decades prior to her faculty appointment in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s. She is a Fellow of both the Society of American Archivists and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. With a particular interest in materiality, memory, and institutional discourse, she has published and lectured widely in the field of archives, historical geography, and the history of photography
John Willis is a historian at the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) who began working at the CMH in 1991 specializing in the social history of postal communication in Canada. John served as curator for the exhibition commemorating the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in 1914: Canada’s Titanic. And more recently he has embarked on a research project documenting the history of the Canadian American border. M. Willis est bilingue et est familier avec l’historiographie québécoise et canadienne-anglaise, entre-autres.