Ian McKay (historian)

Born in 1953, Ian McKay "is one of Canada's most prolific and well-respected historians" and Chair of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. He was formerly a professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, where he taught from 1988-2015. His primary interests are Canadian cultural and political history, the economic and social history of Atlantic Canada, historical memory and tourism, and the history of liberalism, both in its Canadian and transnational aspects. His long-term project is to write a comprehensive history of the Canadian left. He is the younger brother of poet Don McKay, whose works have earned similarly high praise.

In 2009, McKay's Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920 won the prestigious Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, awarded by the Canadian Historical Association for the best book written in Canadian history the previous year. His co-authored work, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia, was awarded the 2010-2011 Pierre Savard Prize (International Council of Canadian Studies) for the best book on Canada in English or French. In 2014, McKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

McKay earned his BA (Hons.) in history from Dalhousie University in 1975. His honours essay was entitled "The Working Class of Metropolitan Halifax, 1850-1889." He then travelled to Britain to study labour history at the University of Warwick in Coventry. He earned his Master's degree there in 1976, with a dissertation entitled "Trade Unionism in the Baking Industry in Great Britain and Ireland, 1857-1974." He then returned to Canada - again to Dalhousie University - where he completed his PhD, entitled, "Industry, Work and Community in the Cumberland Coalfields, 1848-1927," under the supervision of Michael Cross and Judith Fingard. In the 1980s, he served on the Editorial board of New Maritimes.

In the December 2000 issue of the Canadian Historical Review, McKay introduced a new framework for interpreting Canadian history. In "The Liberal Order Framework: A prospectus for a reconnaissance of Canadian history", McKay argues that "the category 'Canada' should henceforth denote a historically specific project of rule, rather than either an essence we must defend or an empty homogeneous space we must possess. Canada-as-project can be analyzed as the implantation and expansion over a heterogeneous terrain of a certain politico-economic logic -- to wit, liberalism." However, far from simply charting victories along the road to liberal order, McKay's approach demands meticulous attention to points of resistance and struggle that shaped the particular contours of Canadian liberalism. Called "reconnaissance" in reference to its Gramscian inspiration, the strategy is at once anti-presentist in seeking to reconstruct the past in its own terms, and present-minded in linking historical findings to contemporary political concerns and ongoing struggles.

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