New Books in Canadian Studies

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Gina Leola Woolsey about her stunning biography, Fifteen Thousand Pieces (Guernica Editions, 2023).  On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1998, an international flight carrying 229 souls crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. There were no survivors. By Friday, Sept 4th, thousands of dismembered body parts had come through...

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian...

Join me for a fascinating conversation with one of today’s leading voices in environmental studies, Daniel Macfarlane, as we explore his new book The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Please see the description of the book below, then tune in to hear Dr. Macfarlane share the insights, research, and stories that shaped this important work. Lake...

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing co...

Canada has had twenty-three prime ministers, all with views and policies that have differed as widely as the ages in which they lived. But what were they like as people? Being Prime Minister (Dundurn, 2018) takes you behind the scenes to tell the story of Canada’s leaders and the job they do as it has never been told before. From John A. Macdonald to Justin Trudeau, readers get a glimpse of the pr...

In Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western, Blood Meridian, the story follows infamous scalp hunter John Joel Glanton through the Mexican borderlands in the mid-19th century. How much of this story is myth, and how much history, asks Texas A&M-San Antonio history professor William Kiser. In his new book, The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America (Yale UP, 2025...

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is str...

Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) by Daniel Coleman is an essential read for Canadians looking to understand our nation’s complicated history. In this NBN episode host Hollay Ghadery talks to Daniel as well as Indigenous artist, writer, and historian Rick Hill about wampum, early settler relations, and how we can use wampum agreements...

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the er...

Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appeared to have topped out, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Higher interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with recent federal budget commitmen...

Hundreds of thousands of Canadians exist on the edge. Renters fear eviction, homeowners feel trapped, and both are vulnerable to becoming homeless with a single stroke of misfortune. Unaffordable housing in Canada is tearing communities apart as long-time residents seek affordable housing elsewhere and businesses shutter because they cannot find staff who can afford to live nearby. For two generat...

In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, in Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) Dr. Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detou...

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle. In the podcast we talked about why the relations between Canada and the countries of the Eastern bloc have so far been underreseached, about the large Central and Eastern European diaspora in Canada and their role in...

Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam (Feral House, 2025) uncovers a forgotten yet fascinating chapter on glam rock music and culture...from Canada. Los Angeles-based multi-disciplinary artist Robert Dayton taps his Canadian roots to reveal mind-blowing stories of musicians fighting to be heard. It's a universal story of determined creators striving to make their voices heard. Dayton has...

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2025) by Gloria Blizzard is a diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion. In this powerful and deeply personal essay collection, Gloria Blizzard, in an international diasporic quest, moves up and down an urban subway line; between Canada and Trinidad; to and from a hospital emergency room; back and forth in time — and as...

The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental reform, Indigenous peoples, trade, hostage diplomacy,...

In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022 (U Toronto Press, 2025), Garrod presents a historical analysis of the Royal Bank of Canada, illustrating how Canadian capitalism and the Canadian banking industry have transformed as they have consolidat...

After years of research, journalist Kathleen Lippa has written about the shocking crimes of a trusted teacher who wrought lasting damage on Inuit communities: Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North (Dundurn Press, February 2025). In the 1970s, a young schoolteacher from British Columbia was becoming the darling of the Northwest Territories education departme...

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024)...

Arts graduate education is uniquely positioned to deliver many of the public good needs of contemporary Canada. For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities (U Alberta, 2024) argues, however, that graduate programs must fundamentally change if they are to achieve this potential. Drawing on deep experience and research, the authors outline how reformed programs t...

The Allied soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were faced with scenes of horror and privation. With breathtaking thoroughness, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (U Toronto Press, 2015) documents what they saw and how they came to terms with those images over the course of the next seventy years...

In Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak and Wynn, 2023), author Mariam Pirbhai looks carefully at the pocket of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experienc...

Both personal and entertaining, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) is the highly anticipated second book of a trilogy and shows Winnipeg author Ariel Gordon at her best: interweaving the personal with the easily-overlooked local and natural and local world around her, and passing on her contagious delight for the world at—and under—our feet. In a diverse range of essays, Go...

Up-and-coming Vancouver trans author Harman Burns joins NBN host Hollay Ghadery to talk about Burns’ novella, Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, 2024). Yellow Barks Spider takes place in the Canadian prairies, but it seeks to explore this landscape through the intimate lens of a ten-year-old trans kid. Set against the backdrop of the placid countryside, dusty summers and barren winters, it is bot...

Ellen Chang-Richardson’s breathtaking poetry collection, Blood/Belies, was released in spring 2024 by Wolsak & Wynn and was a third bestseller in nonfiction in Calgary, Alberta. Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as they bring their father’s, and their own, stori...