Professor
- Ph.D.: Queen's University, 1989
M.A.: Queen's University, 1984
B.A.: University of Guelph, 1982
- University of Guelph, Department of History, 1988-
- Canadian Rural History especially pioneer family and community life, and rural masculinity
Local History
Areas of Research for Graduate Supervision
Canadian Rural History
Irish Immigration to Canada
Local History
Early Settlement
Books
Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada 1799-1871 (Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009).
Winner of the 2008 Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History awarded by the Champlain Society, the Canadian Historical Association’s CLIO Award for Regional History, and the Ontario Historical Society’s tri-annual J.J. Talman Award.
A New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada (Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994).
Articles
"Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood," Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 3 (September 2001): 431-464.
"Tenancy as a Family Strategy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ontario," Journal of Social History 31, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 875-896
"The Scotch-Irish and Immigrant Culture on Amherst Island, Ontario," in Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish, edited by H. Tyler Blethen & Curtis Wood, Jr. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997).
"Demographic and Attitudinal Trends on the Irish Islands, 1891-1946," in Canadian Papers in Rural History 5 (1986): 235-261.
with A. Brookes "Working Away from the Farm: The Young Women of North Huron 1910-1930," Ontario History 77, no. 4 (1985): 281-300.
