I am an environmental historian whose current research projects respectively focus on sport and food. I work on the history of golf course landscapes and the history of the maple syrup industry. Within these projects I examine the creation of real and imagined landscapes in time and place; the development of niche agrarian spaces; the intersection of ecologies and technologies; the evolution of nature tourisms; and the constructions and displays of power relationships within societies.
I am finishing a book on the history of golf course development that is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press and tentatively titled From Rough to Green: Cultivating Golf Course Landscapes in Canada, 1870-1945. It is the first scholarly Canadian text to address not only the history of the sport in this country, but also the interrelated issues of how and why these spaces were imagined and built, as well as how and why golfers were supposed to perform certain identities on them. While focused in Canada, the research also explores the central transnational and trans-Atlantic relationships golfers had within North America, Great Britain, and the wider Commonwealth. I argue that golf courses constitute a distinct landscape category (“golfscape”) defined simultaneously as a playing field and a manifestation of nature. I examine how this duality shaped the playing field’s physical and cultural contours through the rise of golf course architecture and technologies—both transnationally-circulated and locally-sourced—and shaped the physical and cultural placement patterns of private, public, and resort courses across the country that included four national parks (Banff, Jasper, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton).
In addition, this research provides me with avenues to explore historical gender constructions. I am currently finalizing an article that details the construction of “cosmopolitan masculinity” as the dominant male golfing identity of the first half of the twentieth century. This research looks at trans-national cultural processes, specifically, the ways that men in different countries constructed class-based conceptions of masculinity through particular notions of taste, mental and physical conditioning, and relationships with nature.
My second, and newer, project is an interdisciplinary history of the maple syrup industry. I have been involved with maple syrup production since I was a child because my parents “sugar” in the Eastern Townships of Québec. Despite its long history and mainstream value in Canadian culture, little scholarly work has been conducted on the industry’s development in the country. My research considers a range of factors that tie together the history of agriculture, woodlot management, technologies, national symbols, the environment, and Indigenous/Settler relations. My research addresses maple syrup production as both part of a distinct agrarian space and a meaningful part of Canadian food cultures at the national level and within the four major producing provinces (Québec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia). Furthermore, the geographic and cultural contexts of maple syrup production also necessitate trans-border explorations with production with the United States. “Sugaring” histories and contemporary industry conflicts also offer a lens through which to examine Indigenous-Settler relations within the political boundaries of the Canadian nation-state and to connect with and build meaningful and respectful collaborations with Indigenous scholars and knowledge keepers. Initial research findings were presented to the Mount Allison and wider academic community when I delivered the George F. G. Stanley Lecture in Canadian Studies 2017. My research on maple syrup also appears in the recently released collection Symbols of Canada, published by Between the Lines, in October 2018 that aims to problematize and complicate mainstream cultural symbols to a wider, popular audience.