Colin M Coates

Full Professor

Canadian Studies | History | Individualized Studies

   York Hall 161
   416-487-6776
   ccoates@glendon.yorku.ca
   Recent and current professional activities.pdf

Professor Colin Coates teaches Canadian Studies and History. A specialist in the history of early French Canada, he is also interested in the history of Canadian utopias and environmental history. Past President of the Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d'études canadiennes, he was director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies from 2011 to 2015.


Environmental History
Francophone Communities
Indigenous People
Québec

History of utopias in Canada

Doctorate:
History, York University
Masters:
History, University of British Columbia

I have published in the following areas:  rural and cultural history, history of commemoration, environmental history, history of power, digital history, Canadian studies.

Books

  • (Co-editor, with Graeme Wynn) The Nature of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), 376 pp. 
  • (Head of translation-revision team) Daniel Heidt, dir., La Confédération, 1864-1999: Nouvelles perspectives (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2019), i-ix, 336 pp.
  • (Co-editor, with Jay Young and Ben Bradley) Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 341 pp.
  • (Editor) Canadian Countercultures and the Environment (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016)
  • (Co-editor, with Geoffrey Ewen) Introduction aux études canadiennes: histoires, identités, cultures (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2012).  Publisher's Site https://press.uottawa.ca/introduction-aux-ctudes-canadiennes.html
  • (Editor) Majesty in Canada: Essays on the Role of Royalty (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006), ed., 280 pp.  Publisher's Site  
  • (Author) Les Transformations du paysage et de la société au Québec sous le régime seigneurial, traduit par Jude Des Chênes (Sillery: Septentrion, 2003), 262 pp.  Publisher's Site  
  • (Co-author, with Cecilia Morgan), Heroines and History: Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 368 pp.  Publisher's Site  
  • (Author) The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 231 pp.  Publisher's Site 
  • (Editor), Imperial Canada (Edinburgh: Centre of Canadian Studies, 1997), 221 pp.   
Journal Articles

  • “Statues in Time: Canadian Days and Holidays” Acadiensis 48, 2 (Autumn 2019): 241-51.
  • (Co-author, with Jim Clifford, Beatrice Alex, Ewan Klein, and Andrew Watson), “Geoparsing History: Locating Commodities in Ten Million Pages of Nineteenth-Century Sources” Historical Methods 49, 3 (July-September, 2016), forthcoming.
  • (Co-author, with Dagomar DeGroot) “‘Les bois engendrent le frimas et les gelées : comprendre le climat en Nouvelle-France” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 68, 3-4 (hiver-printemps 2015): 197-219. 
  • (Co-author, with Sonya Lipsett-Rivera), “Un Canadien errant: Louis-Marie Moreau, dit Coulon: hérésie et rébellion au Nouveau-Mexique”, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 63, 4 (printemps 2010): 435-64. English version of this article: "Un Canadien Errant" in New Mexico: Louis-Marie Moreau dit Coulon's Heresy and Rebellion", New Mexico Historical Review, 87, 4 (Fall 2012): 457-484.   
  • "The Rebellions of 1837-8, and other bourgeois revolutions in Quebec historiography" International Journal of Canadian Studies 20 (Fall 1999): 19-34; reprinted in R. Douglas Francis and Donald B. Smith, eds, Readings in Canadian History: Pre-Confederation 6th edition (Toronto: Nelson Thomson, 2002), pp. 280-291.   
  • "Like 'the Thames towards Putney': The Appropriation of Landscape in Lower Canada" Canadian Historical Review Vol LXXIV, no. 3 (September, 1993): 317-343. (Abridged version in David Freeland Duke, ed., Canadian Environmental History (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2006), pp. 223-237).   
  • "Authority and Illegitimacy in New France: The Burial of Bishop Saint-Vallier and Madeleine de Verchères vs. the Priest of Batiscan" Histoire sociale - Social History Vol. XXII, no. 43 (May 1989): 65-90.

Book Chapters

  • “Le crépuscule prolongé des communaux de la vallée du Saint-Laurent, Canada. Autorité centrale et contrôle paysan” in Fabien Locher, dir., La Nature en communs. Ressources, environnement et communautés (France et Empire français XVIIe-XXIe siècles) (Ceyzérieu, France: Champ Vallon, 2020), pp. 187-207.
  • “Madeleine de Verchères (1678-1747): Woman Warrior of French Canada”, in Boyd Cothran, John Judge and Adrian Shubert, eds., Woman Warriors and National Heroes: A Global History (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 131-147.
  • “Back to the Land” in Colin M. Coates and Graeme Wynn, eds., The Nature of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), pp. 123-141.
  • “The Beaver” in Michael Dawson, Catherine Gidney and Donald Wright, eds., Symbols of Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018), pp. 8-17. (Excerpt published in the Globe and Mail, 17 November 2018.
  • “The State against Canadian Studies” in Susan Hodgett and Patrick James, eds., Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Contemporary Perspective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), pp. 155-166.
  • “Une utopie française en Alberta:  le phalanstère du docteur Adalbert Tanche à Sylvan Lake, 1906-1908” reprinted in Sathya Rao, dir., La présence franco-européenne dans l’Ouest canadien : Histoires de colons belges, français et suisses à l’aube du XXe siècle (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 161-79. First published in now-defunct on-line journal : e-crini (revue électronique de l’Université de Nantes) (2012).
  • “Canadian Countercultures and their Environments” in Colin M. Coates, ed., Canadian Countercultures and the Environment (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), pp. 1-25.        
  • “Les cabales coloniales: la présence des élites dans le discours politique de la Nouvelle-France sous Louis XIV” in Thierry Nootens et Jean-René Thuot, eds., Les figures du pouvoir à travers le temps : Formes, pratiques, et intérêts des groupes élitaires au Québec, XVIIe-XXe siècles (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012), pp. 37-44.  Publisher's Site 
  • “Vestiges du régime français,” in Geoffrey Ewen et Colin M. Coates, dirs., Introduction aux études canadiennes: histoires, identités, cultures (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2012), 22-34.   
  • “The Colonial Landscapes of Early Montreal” in Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais, eds, Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 19-36.  Publisher's Site 
  • “Seeing and Not Seeing: Landscape Art as a Historical Source” in Alan MacEachern and William J. Turkel, eds., Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History (Toronto: Nelson Education, 2009), pp. 140-157.   
  • “French Canadians’ Ambivalence to the British Empire” in Phillip Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 181-199.   
  • “Canadian National Identity, 18th century to 1945” in Guntram H. Herb and David H. Kaplan, eds., Nations and Nationalisms in Global Perspective: An Encyclopedia of Origins, Development and Contemporary Transitions (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008), vol. I: 298-308.   
  • “Problems of Precedence in Louis XIV’s New France” in Colin M. Coates, ed., Majesty in Canada: Essays on the Role of Royalty (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006).   
  • “Introduction: Majesty in Canada” in Colin M. Coates, ed., Majesty in Canada: Essays on the Role of Royalty (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006).
  • “The Iroquois of the Scottish Enlightenment: Scottish Readings of Aboriginal Society in the Eighteenth Century” in Pierre Anctil and Zilá Bernd, eds., Canada from the Outside In: New Trends in Canadian Studies (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 189-200.   
  • “La diversité de la communauté chinoise de la Colombie Britannique” in Marta Dvórak et Gérard Borras, dirs., Les Amériques et le Pacifique (Université de Rennes 2 : CEC-LIRA Équipe ERILAR, 2003), pp. 167-78.   
  • “Multiculturalism in Colonial Society: Canadian Examples from the 17th and 18th Centuries” in Barbara Saunders and David Haljan, eds., Whither Multiculturalism?: A Politics of Dissensus (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), pp. 225-234.   
  • “La mémoire en pierre: Les statues commémoratives au Québec de 1800 à 1923” in Ingo Kolboom, dir., Gedächtnisorte im anderen Amerika – Tradition und Moderne in Québec (Heidelberg: Synchron Publishers, 2002), pp. 83-96. (Tranlsation of the article published in Focus on Quebec)   
  • “Memory and Commemoration in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Quebec” in Christopher Rolfe, ed., Focus on Quebec: Five Essays on Québécois Society & Culture (Edinburgh: British Association for Canadian Studies, 1999), pp. 1-13.
  • "Canada" in John Cannon, ed., Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 159-160.   
  • "From Parliament Hill to Vimy Ridge: Imperial Canada, 1867-1917" [Preface] to Colin M. Coates, ed., Imperial Canada, 1867-1917 (Edinburgh: Centre of Canadian Studies, 1997), pp. 159-160.   
  • (Co-author with Megan J. Davies), "Kathleen Wood-Legh: A Canadian in Cambridge" in Alison Prentice and Beverly Boutilier, eds., Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and Work of History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), pp. 254-270.   
  • "Commemorating the Woman Warrior of New France: Madeleine de Verchères" in Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld, eds., Gender and History in Canada (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996), pp. 120-136.
Other Publications

•    “Refaire l’histoire” Argument: Politique, société, histoire 12, 2 (printemps-été 2010): 133-42.   
•    “Teaching History Across Borders : The Collaboration between York and Arizona State Universities” Bulletin of the Canadian Historical Association 36, 2 (2010) : pp. 36-38.

President, Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d'études canadiennes, 2010-2015.

Chair, Organising committee, Annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Toronto, April 2013.

Director, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University, 2011-2015.

Editor (English-language), Histoire sociale - Social History, 2004-2007.

Editor, Themes in Canadian History series, University of Toronto Press, 2004-présent


Prize for the best edited collection, Canadian Studies Network – Réseau d’études canadiennes, for The Nature of Canada, October 2020.

Principal’s Teaching Excellence Award, Glendon College, 2019.

Certificate of Merit, International Council for Canadian Studies, 2018.

Prix Lionel Groulx – Fondation Yves-Saint-Germain, Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, for Heroines and History, October 2003.

Honourable Mention, Sir John A Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association, for Heroines and History, May 2003.

Canada Research Chair in Canadian Cultural Landscapes, 2003-2013 


  • Canadian Heritage, Source/Story, (2021-present)
  • SSHRC, Commerce impérial et transformations environnementales: la formation des hectares fantômes dans la vallée laurentienne, 1763-1918, (2017-present)
  • SSHRC-JISC, Digging into data, "Trading Consequences" (2014-2016)
  • SSHRC, Connections Grant: Environmental Mobilities (2011)
  • SSHRC, Member of Executive, New Initiative in Canadian History & Environment (niche-canada.org) (2007-2014)

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