MEET THE INNOVATORS

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Broadening the Reach of Canadian Studies
Trent’s Canada Research Chair and Looking at Canada Differently

For more than 30 years, Dr. Bryan Palmer has been carving out a legacy as a leading expert in the field of Canadian Studies.

In the mid-1970s, with Trent University’s founding president THB Symons conducting a Royal Commission on Canadian Studies and supporting the establishment of the University’s Department of Canadian Studies, Professor Bryan Palmer was pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States.

At the time, few Canadian universities offered supervision in the area Professor Palmer wanted to research – working-class history. But he was keen to develop an expertise, informed by international scholarship, that he might then help build in uniquely Canadian ways.

Over the next decades, he did just that.

From working class to Toronto’s dispossessed
After teaching positions at McGill, Simon Fraser and Queen’s University in the 1970s and 1980s, Prof. Palmer played a pivotal role in building, sustaining, and editing Labour/Le Travail, a journal of Canadian working-class history and labour studies with a global reputation.  

Today, as a tier one Canada research chair of Canadian Studies at Trent University, Prof. Palmer is author of 13 books, many of which have been nominated for and won prestigious awards. He has also edited collections and pamphlets, as well as dozens of articles and review essays that have often been republished in translation, appearing in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, and other languages.

Currently Prof. Palmer is completing a co-authored study with a Toronto anti-poverty activist, Gaetan Heroux. The Long History of the Toronto Dispossessed covers almost two centuries of poor people’s campaigns for work and wages, health care and housing, sustenance and schooling.

“It seems fitting in this time of widespread criminalization of the poor to try to reinsert them into understandings of the ways working people have always fought to push for their collective rights, extending our sense of social justice,” says Prof. Palmer, whose scholarly writing on trade unions and labour-capital conflict was cited in a November 2014 Supreme Court decision establishing public sector workers’ right to strike.

Today, Prof. Palmer’s legacy of scholarship continues as European publisher, Brill, is currently preparing a two-volume collection of Prof. Palmer’s writings, reprinting a selection of his empirical studies and theoretical essays. These writings accomplish what Prof. Palmer set out to do all those years ago – broaden the reach of Canadian Studies, which has always been about knowing ourselves better and knowing ourselves differently.

Fostering intellectual curiosity
Reflecting on his time at Trent, Prof. Palmer says, “I was delighted to come to Trent because the study of Canada was so central to the University’s mission.  Yet there was also considerable intellectual curiosity, a willingness to take Canadian Studies in new, often international, directions.”

Over the next decade and-a-half Prof. Palmer taught in the undergraduate Canadian Studies program and chaired the Department from 2007-2009. He contributed regularly to three graduate programs, the MA in History, and the Frost Centre’s MA and PhD programs, supervising four PhDs and seven MAs.  
One of the fruits of Prof. Palmer’s research labours was a widely-praised University of Toronto Press study, Canada in the 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (2009). For Prof. Palmer, the book is a direct result of the stimulation of teaching in Canadian Studies.

“The undergraduate students at Trent were a perfect sounding board for my research and ideas,” Prof. Palmer states, “and my colleagues read and offered comment on the book before it went into print.”