J. Andrew Ross

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Guelph

I am a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century business, labour, culture, and sport history. I am also interested in problems relevant to digital humanities, historical database linkage techniques, anthropometric studies, globalizing organizations, and sport management.

As a postdoctoral fellow w in historical record linkage and longitudinal data at the University of Guelph Historical Data Research Unit, I am working on an exciting digital humanities project, People in Motion, which is devising an automated system to link people in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian, American, and British censuses. This project is supported by a CFI grant and will soon make possible sophisticated longitudinal and transnational studies of the Canadian population across historical time and geographic space. My particular research interest is the study of occupational change, labour market patterns, and occupational mobility of Canadian immigrants and emigrants, especially businessmen and entrepreneurs.

At the University of Western Ontario I first became interested in North American business history at and completed a master's thesis on Canadian piano manufacturing. My subsequent PhD research turned to the quintessential Canadian sport and its primary business exponent, the Nationla Hockey League. The work was supported by SSHRC, OGS, and Fulbright grants, and resulted in a dissertation, 'Hockey Capital: Commerce, Culture and the National Hockey League, 1917-1967,' which examined the business and labour history of the elite commercial hockey industry in its formative years. So far, I have presented the results of my research at over a dozen conferences and published them in several chapters and articles (see my Curriculum vitae). My first monograph, Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945, is currently under contract to Syracuse University Press. I also recently co-edited a collection of Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries on Canadian entrepreneurs, which appeared in both English and French in the fall of 2011.

At Guelph, I teach courses on the history of the world economy, American sport, and next year (winter 2013) will be inaugurating a fourth-year course on digital humanities. In the past I have taught Canadian social history, immigration history, and management and organizational studies. As a teacher, my goal is to help students develop their skills in critical reading, writing, analysis, and also to awaken in them a spirit of self-directed learning about history.

You can contact me at: jaross at uoguelph.ca

Recent news:

Read a profile on my hockey work in atGuelph

Listen to a recent interview on Cross-Country Checkup about 'Canada's team'

J. Andrew Ross

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Guelph

Curriculum Vitae

Hoghee! (my sporadically updated blog)