John Reid

John Reid

John Reid holds degrees from Oxford University (BA), Memorial University (MA), and the University of New Brunswick (PhD). He has been a member of the History department at Saint Mary’s University since 1985, and has held the rank of Professor since 1989. He is also a former Coordinator of Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s, and is currently 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. He has published books and articles in these areas, as well as writing two historical novels for teenage readers and two plays for radio. Reid has served on the Council of the Canadian Historical Association and on the editorial board of the Canadian Historical Review. A current board member of three historical journals, in 2015 he completed a six-year term as Co-editor of Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region. He is also founding Co-editor of the University of Toronto Press monograph series on the History of Atlantic Canada. Among other international activities, in 2008 he held the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (SICI) Visiting Lectureship in India. Subsequently appointed as the Saint Mary’s representative to the Canadian Member Council of SICI, he became the organization’s Vice-President/President Elect in 2018.

Harold E Wright

Harold Wright

Harold E. Wright is a native of Saint John. He has spent much of the past 40 years championing the preservation and understanding of our heritage.
 He has written over a dozen books on local heritage and is often consulted by the media and local organizations on Saint John and regional heritage subjects. His work has received recognition at the international, national, provincial and local levels. He recently received the Minister of Veteran’s Affairs Commendation for his work in preserving the heritage of veterans.
 Mr. Wright is an active member of the Turnbull (NB) Chapter, Canadian Aviation Historical Society, the Memory Project, and the Friends of the NB Military History Museum at Base Gagetown. He is a long-time volunteer with the Dalhousie-NB Medical School.
 He has focused his retirement years on the story of veterans and cadets, with a concentration on aviation subjects and the story of the SS/HMS Jervis Bay. He has amassed a large collection of Jervis Bay memorabilia including the only known piece of the ship to survive its sinking.

Barry Cahill

Retired provincial civil servant. Holds graduate degrees from Dalhousie and Oxford Universities. Most recently was researcher for the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children Restorative Inquiry. At present is working on a scholarly biography of Lorne Clarke.

Kenneth Paulsen

Kenneth Paulsen

Kenneth Paulsen holds a doctorate in Canadian History from the University of Maine at Orono, with two Bachelors of Arts degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Master of Arts degree from Northeastern University in Boston. He was a Fulbright scholar at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a Canadian Embassy Graduate Fellow and the 1992 Winthrop Pickard Bell Fellow in Canadiana at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Currently, he is an adjunct faculty member at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He is a member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Genealogical Association of Nova Scotia, and the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. The majority of his ancestors were foreign Protestant settlers in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia. Kenneth’s paternal grandfather’s ancestry is Danish and Swedish while his paternal great grandmother’s ancestry is Prince Edward Island Scottish and Loyalist.

Kirby Ross

Kirby Ross

Kirby Ross is a Master of History student at Saint Mary’s University and an Executive Member at Large of the Halifax Women’s History Society. Specializing in women’s contributions on the homefront in Nova Scotia during World War Two, she wrote her Undergraduate Honours thesis on women’s involvement in the shipbuilding and ammunition industries in Pictou County during Second World War. She is currently writing her Master’s thesis on entertainers during the Second World War in Halifax.

Kirrily Freeman

Kirrily Freeman

Kirrily Freeman is Associate Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. Her teaching and research focus on the social and cultural history of the two world wars. Her first book, Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary (Stanford UP, 2009) dealt with the French campaign to melt metal statues during WWII. Her current book looks at the town of Vichy and its efforts to reinvent itself since the Second World War.

Richard Field

Dr Field holds an MA degree in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and a PhD in History from Dalhousie University. He is currently Adjunct Professor in the Atlantic Canada Studies Interdisciplinary Program and a Research Associate with the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary’s University.

Sara Spike

Sara Spike

Dr. Sara Spike is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. Her scholarly work focuses on the cultural history of rural communities in Atlantic Canada with a particular emphasis on coastal environments. Since receiving her PhD from Carleton University in 2016, she has returned home to Nova Scotia, working as a historical consultant, most notably at Sherbrooke Village Museum, and as the lead researcher for the Eastern Shore Islands Heritage Research Project. This is a government-funded, community-directed study of the coastal archipelago along Nova Scotia’s often-overlooked Eastern Shore.