Kristine Alexander

Associate Professor, History

Dr. Kristine Alexander is L.R. Wilson Chair in Canadian History, Associate Professor of History, and Director of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. She received her BA (Honours) from the University of Winnipeg and her MA and PhD in History at York University. Prior to her appointment at McMaster, Dr. Alexander was Associate Professor of History and Director of the cross-faculty Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, where she also held the Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies. She currently serves as President of the international Society for the History of Children and Youth.

Dr. Alexander’s research analyzes the history of modern Canada in broader global contexts of empire and settler colonialism, and her scholarship and teaching combine archival research with innovative practices of intergenerational and community-engaged collaboration. She is the author of the award-winning book Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (UBC Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (MQUP, 2023), A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2022), and "Mapping Modern Rejuvenation" (special issue, Journal of Social History, Summer 2020). Dr. Alexander has also written twenty-four peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, many of which use the history of young people to open up new questions about methodology, epistemology, and evidence. These essays include work on the history of emotions, the analytical limits of the concept of agency, the influence of settler colonialism on Canadian social history, and the value of photographic evidence in colonial contexts.

Dr. Alexander’s current research includes a SSHRC-funded book project entitled Children of the State: Age, Race, and Settler Colonialism in Canada, a collaborative examination of the past, present, and future of "Canadian Studies" and postsecondary education in Canada, and a special issue of the journal French Historical Studies about children, race, and empire in the French-speaking world.

Dr. Alexander has given keynote lectures and invited talks at universities on four continents, and regularly shares her findings with the public through podcasts, blog posts, webinars, and interviews with local and national media. She believes strongly in the value of collaboration, and has co-authored public-facing and peer-reviewed writing with colleagues from Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and the United States. Dr. Alexander also regularly collaborates with students and postdoctoral fellows on publications, presentations, and public history projects, and this aspect of her work was recognized with the University of Lethbridge’s 2024 Graduate Mentorship Award.