Contributors

Claudine Bonner is an associate professor of race and ethnicity at Acadia University. She is a scholar of the twentieth century with a specialization in Black Canadian history. Her research and teaching interests focus on African diaspora (im)migration and settlement in the Atlantic world, Black Canadian labour history, and diversity and equity in education. Her current research explores early twentieth-century African-Caribbean migration networks, inserting Nova Scotia into the discussion as more than simply a point of transit, as has often been suggested.

Ken Donovan is a retired Parks Canada historian who has published widely on Cape Breton history. His groundbreaking work on the history of Louisbourg contributed to a broader understanding of gender and racialized experiences within the eighteenth-century settlement. His work on Cape Breton history, including his two major edited collections, The Island and Cape Breton at 200, has been foundational for generations of regional scholars.

David Frank is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. His research focuses on working-class and labour history in Atlantic Canada and social biography. He is widely known for his award-winning biography of labour leader J. B. McLachlan, which is considered a classic work of Canadian social history. One of his major books, Provincial Solidarities, covers a full century of working-class history in New Brunswick and was published in both English and French editions. He has coauthored or edited ten other books and published more than a hundred journal articles, book chapters, and reference essays. He has also played a leading role in the promotion of Atlantic regional history.

Ronald Labelle is a senior scholar at Cape Breton University and a former associate professor of French and Acadian studies. He is a specialist in Acadian traditional culture who completed his doctoral studies in ethnology at Université Laval. He worked at the Université de Moncton Centre d’études acadiennes, first as folklore archivist and then as director. He later held the McCain research chair in Acadian ethnology in the same institution before becoming associate professor of French and Acadian studies at Cape Breton University. His publications include The Acadians of Chezzetcook and Au Village-du-Bois (France-Acadie Literary Prize, 1986). In 2011, he curated an exhibit held at the Université de Moncton’s Acadian Museum entitled the Art of Storytelling in Acadie.

Will Langford is an assistant professor of history at Dalhousie University. His research interests include histories of political activism, social movements, environmental change, and transnational connections. His first book, The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada, is a history of development programs that approached the problem of ending poverty by empowering poor people and trying to create a more meaningful democracy. He is currently working on a history of right-wing political movements in late twentieth-century Canada.

Lachlan MacKinnon is an associate professor of history and Canada research chair in postindustrial communities at Cape Breton University. His research interests include deindustrialization and working-class experience in Atlantic Canada, regional development policy, and international labour history.

Del Muise is a professor emeritus of history at Carleton University. Muise has been involved with Atlantic Canadian history for the past forty years. He has numerous publications in the area, including a coeditorship of one of the major texts in the field, The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation. His publications have ranged over the field of political and economic history, the coal mining industry in the region, and cultural expression in the region.

Don Nerbas is an associate professor and the St. Andrew’s Society / McEuen Scholarship Foundation chair in Canadian-Scottish studies. He is also a member of the Montreal History Group / Groupe d’histoire de Montréal. His work centres on the history of capitalism, particularly its social, political, and cultural dimensions, and he has published widely on the politics of business and the political economy of capitalism in Canada. His current research centres on Cape Breton’s coal trade and the social and political history of Cape Breton’s Sydney coalfield in the nineteenth century, which was powerfully shaped by Scottish migration and settlement, an aspect of the entangled histories of colonialism and industrialism. More broadly, his historical interests include the Scottish factor and the rise of capitalism during the long nineteenth century in northern North America as well as social biography.

Andrew Parnaby is an associate professor of history and dean of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Cape Breton University. The author of several books, articles, and reviews in labour, working-class, and political history, he serves on the editorial boards of Labour/Le Travail and the Canadian Historical Review.

John G. Reid is a professor emeritus at Saint Mary’s University, where he has been a member of the Department of History since 1985. He is also a former coordinator of Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s and is a senior research fellow at the Gorsebrook Research Institute. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, elected in 2004. Reid’s principal teaching and research interests include the history of early modern northeastern North America (focusing especially on imperial-Indigenous relations), the history of Atlantic Canada, the history of higher education, and the history of sport.

Anne-Louise Semple is an honorary associate professor at Macquarie University. She has a sustained record of strategic leadership and management and education from employment experience at six universities in three countries, stretching over more than two decades. As a geographer, her approach to leadership and work more broadly has been inspired by a desire to understand place and its many elements (environment, people, cultures, politics, and so on). This has resulted in award-winning and evidence-based learning and teaching and nationally and internationally recognized leadership and research—including works focused on the development, implementation, and management of work-integrated learning (WIL) initiatives, ethical practice in the context of WIL, reflection for learning, community engagement, and various dimensions of geography.

Heather Sparling is a professor of ethnomusicology and Canada research chair in musical traditions at Cape Breton University. Her research interests include Gaelic song in Nova Scotia, vernacular dance traditions of Cape Breton, and Atlantic Canadian disaster songs. Sparling’s research addresses issues of memory and memorialization as well as language revitalization through music. She is the author of Reeling Roosters and Dancing Ducks: Celtic Mouth Music (2014) and is the editor of the journal MUSICultures. Sparling also has a background in educational development and has been involved with the creation and revision of several academic programs at CBU.

Martha Walls is an associate professor of history at Mount Saint Vincent University. Her research area lies in Atlantic Canadian First Nations history, with a specialization in the historical experiences of twentieth-century First Nations women. Her book, No Need of a Chief for This Band: The Maritime Mi’kmaq and Federal Electoral Legislation, 1899–1951, was published by the University of British Columbia Press in 2010. Her work has also appeared in Acadiensis, the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, and the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. Walls is currently working on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council–funded study of the Micmac Community Development Program and studies that examine the experiences of female Aboriginal day school teachers and the role gender played in the disestablishment of the New Germany Mi’kmaq reserve in Nova Scotia.