BA (Honours), University of Alberta
MA and PhD, University of Toronto
902-457-6335
msvu.ca
Ken Dewar grew up in Edmonton and taught at the University of Victoria, Wilfrid Laurier, and Carleton before coming to the Mount in 1982. He also owned a bookstore for a half-dozen years in Elora, Ontario. He retired in June 2011 and was awarded Professor Emeritus status in the Department of History.
Prof. Dewar’s research interests lie in the fields of historiography and Canadian intellectual history. His book,
Charles Clarke, Pen and Ink Warrior, is a study of a nineteenth-century radical liberal thinker, politician, and merchant in his small-town, provincial, and transatlantic milieu. He is currently interested in the life and thought of F.H. Underhill, a twentieth-century historian and intellectual who played a leading role in the spread of social democratic ideas in Canada. In 2009, Prof. Dewar delivered the W.C. Desmond Pacey Memorial Lecture at the University of New Brunswick on “F.H. Underhill and the Making of ‘The Intellectual,’” later published in
History of Intellectual Culture, Vol. 8 (2008/09) (http://www.ucalgary.ca/hic).
Prof. Dewar received the Alumnae Award for Teaching in 2002, the Senate Award for Service in University Governance in 2009, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers Dedicated Service Award in 2010. He served on the Council of the Canadian Historical Association from 1992 to 1995.
Select Publications “Frank Underhill: Intellectual in Search of a Role,”
The Underhill Review, Fall 2008 (http://www.carleton.ca/underhillreview).
“Frank Underhill: The Historian as Essayist,”
The Underhill Review, Fall 2007 (http://www.carleton.ca/underhillreview).
“Hilda Neatby’s 1950s and My 1950s,”
Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 40, No.1 (Winter 2006), 210-31.
Charles Clarke, Pen and Ink Warrior (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
“Intellectual History,”
Encyclopaedia of Literature in Canada, ed. W. H. New (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
"Geoffrey Barraclough: From Historicism to Historical Science,"
The Historian, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Spring 1994), 449-64.
"Where to Begin and How: Narrative Openings in Donald Creighton's Historiography,"
Canadian Historical Review, Vol. LXXII, No. 3 (September, 1991), 348-69.