J. Andrew Ross Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Guelph

In the News: Click here to read a recent profile on my work in atGuelph

Curriculum Vitae Hoghee! (my blog) Historical Data Research Unit Department of History Department of Economics Luiza Antonie’s page on Record Linkage

I am a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century business, labour, culture, and sport history. I am also interested in problems relevant to historical database linkage techniques, anthropometric studies, globalizing organizations, and sport management. As an undergraduate I studied European History at McGill University, and for graduate work became interested in North American business history, completing a master’s thesis at the University of Western Ontario on Canadian piano manufacturing. My subsequent PhD research was supported by SSHRC, OGS, and Fulbright grants, and resulted in a dissertation, “Hockey Capital: Commerce, Culture and the National Hockey League, 1917–1967” (UWO, 2008), that examined the business and labour history of the elite commercial hockey industry in its formative years. I have produced several journal articles and book chapters, and plan to have it published as two monographs in the next few years. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph Historical Data Research Unit, I am working on an exciting digital humanities project that 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. 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 (pdf)). I am also co-editing a popular collection of Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries on Canadian business people for publication in the fall of 2011. I also add some historical perspective to select current issues in hockey at my blog, Hoghee! I teach courses in the Departments of History and Economics at the University of Guelph, and have taught in History, American Studies, and Management/ Organizational Studies at the University of Western Ontario. 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