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Edward Dunsworth

Edward Dunsworth
Contact Information
Address: 

Leacock, Rm 628
Department of History 855 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7

Email address: 
edward.dunsworth [at] mcgill.ca
Position: 
Assistant Professor
Office: 
LEA 628
Specialization: 

Migration, Labour, Politics, Canada and the World, 1900-today

Specialization by time period: 
1900 - Today
Specialization by geographical area: 
North America
Office hours: 

Winter 2024:

Tuesday 11:00-12:00pm

Biography: 

Edward Dunsworth is a historian of labour, migration, and politics, with an interest in studying Canada in a global context. A trio of projects completed between 2022 and 2024 examine the history of migrant farm labour in Canada. His first book, (۲ݮƵ-Queen’s University Press, 2022) uses Ontario’s tobacco sector as a case study to explore the histories of farm labour and temporary foreign workers programs in Canada. It was awarded the Henry A. Wallace Award by the Agricultural History Society, United States, was a finalist for the Wilson Book Prize (McMaster University), and received an honourable mention for the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies’ book prize.

His second book was a collaboration with the St. Lucian-Canadian migrant farm worker-activist, Gabriel Allahdua, to produce Allahdua’s memoir: (Between the Lines, 2023). It won the Legislative Assembly of Ontario’s Speaker’s Book Award and was longlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize.

A third farm labour project was the digital exhibit, (2024). Created with a team of nine graduate and undergraduate students, the exhibit explores the history of death, injury, and illness among migrant farm workers, from the 1930s to the Covid-19 pandemic of the 2020s.

An active public historian, Dunsworth is a member of the editorial collective at , a founding member of the Toronto Workers’ History Project, and a frequent author of articles for broader audiences. His current research concerns left parliamentary politics and the politics of immigration in interwar Canada.

Selected publications: 

Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Canada’s Agricultural Workforce (Montreal: ۲ݮƵ-Queen’s University Press, 2022)

Gabriel Allahdua, with Edward Dunsworth, Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2023)

“‘Me a free man’: resistance and racialisation in the Canada-Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program,” Oral History 49, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 71-82.

“Race, Exclusion, and Archival Silences in the Seasonal Migration of Tobacco Workers from the Southern United States to Ontario,” Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 4 (Dec. 2018): 563-93.

“Green Gold, Red Threats: Organization and Resistance in Depression-Era Ontario Tobacco,” Labour/Le Travail 79 (Spring 2017): 105-142.

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