Principal, Catharine Parr Traill College
B.A. Hon. (Ottawa) M.A.(Queen’s), M.Phil (Cambridge), Ph.D. (Queen’s)
Catharine Parr Traill College, Scott House 107, 705-748-1011 ext. 6218, michaeleamon@trentu.ca
Adjunct Professor, M.A. English Literature (Public Texts), M.A. History, Ph.D. Cultural Studies, M.A./Ph.D. Frost Centre for Canadian Studies & Indigenous Studies
I am an historian of print culture in early Canada. My recent book, Imprinting Britain, looks at the development of the press in Nova Scotia and Quebec during the eighteenth century. The press was both a means of sociability and a vehicle to inform and enliven other fora of interaction such as coffee houses, clubs and theatre. I also have had a career, outside of the university, in public history, museums, archives, heritage preservation and the digital humanities. I have published and lecture on all of these subjects at Trent. An ardent support of collegiate universities like Trent, I am the chair of Collegiate Way International, a global organization that promotes our unique style of scholarly, interdisciplinary communities within higher education.
Selected Publications
Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 2015.
“Constructing a Collegiate Compass: Navigating Change in the Culturally-Constructed Collegiate University” in The Collegiate Way, Tim Burt and Martyn Evans, eds. (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), 2016.
“The War Against Public Forgetfulness: Commemorating 1812 in Canada.” London Journal of Canadian Studies 28 (2013-14): 134-185.
“‘An Extensive Collection of Useful and Entertaining Books:’ The Quebec Library and the Transatlantic Enlightenment in Canada.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 23,1 (2012): 1-38.
“‘Don’t Speak to Me, but Write of This:’ The Childhood Almanacs of Mary and Katherine Byles.” The New England Quarterly 85, 2 (2012): 335-352.
“The Québec Clerk Controversy: A Study in Sociability, the Public Sphere & the Eighteenth-Century Spirit of Enlightenment.” Canadian Historical Review 90,4 (2009): 609-638.
“Tracing the Scottish Enlightenment in British North America: Scottish-Trained Medical Practitioners and Their Participation in a Trans-Atlantic Culture of Ideas.” in Nancy Christie, ed. Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America. (Kingston-Montréal: Queen’s-McGill Press, 2008), 283-329.
“A ‘Genuine Relationship With the Actual’: New Perspectives on Primary Sources, History and the Internet in the Classroom.” The History Teacher 39,3 (May 2006): 297-314.
“Finding Enlightenment in the National Archives of Canada: The Commonplace Book of James Sholto Douglas.” Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): 155-188.