Lara Campbell

Professor, History

Lara Campbell is Full Professor and Endowed Research Chair with the Wilson College of Leadership and Civic Engagement, and Professor in the Department of History.

Dr. Campbell received her BA (History) and BSW (Social Work) from McMaster, MA (History) from the University of Toronto), and PhD (History) from Queen’s University. Prior to her appointment at McMaster, she was Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, where she also served as Department Chair, Associate Dean, and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Dr. Campbell teaches and researches in Canadian women’s and gender history, social movement and welfare state history, and feminist theory. Her sole-authored books include Respectable Citizens: Women, Gender and the Family in Ontario’s Great Depressio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), which received honourable mentions for best scholarly book from the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Women’s Studies Association, and A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia ( Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020), which received the Canadian Historical Association Clio Prize for Best Book in British Columbia History, the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia, and a commendation from the British Columbia Historical Federation for the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing. She has also published numerous edited and co-written collections including Feeling Feminism: Affect, Activism, and Emotional Histories of the Canadian Second Wave (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022), Gender History: Canadian Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014), Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, 8^th Edition (Oxford University Press, 2016), Worth Fighting For: War Resistance in Canada from the War of 1812 to the War on Terror. (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2015), and Debating Dissent: The Sixties in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

Her published articles includes essays on maternalism and social protest, antiwar masculinity, chronology and periodization of the 1960s, transnational suffage, and the interesection of feminist and antiwar activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Her current research includes a co-written history of the Canadian welfare state, a SSHRC funded project on transnational anti-draft and antiwar activism during the Vietnam war, and a co-authored project on the intersection of suffrage and socialist feminism in Canada.