Dr. John Reid

Profile

Email: john.reid@smu.ca

John Reid is Professor Emeritus of History at Saint Mary’s University, and Senior Research Fellow of the Gorsebrook Research Institute. He is a former co-editor of Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, and is also a founding co-editor of the University of Toronto Press monograph series, Studies in Atlantic Canada History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (elected in 2004), and has also served as President of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. Much of his research has focused on northeastern North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including settler colonialism and imperial-Indigenous relations, while more recently he has turned his attention to sport history and particularly to the history of cricket.

Reid’s current project on the history of cricket in Nova Scotia as a settler pursuit focuses on the social and cultural characteristics of the sport, as well as its environmental implications. Publications in this area have so far included “Diffusion and Discursive Stabilization: Sports Historiography and the Contrasting Fortunes of Cricket and Ice Hockey in Canada’s Maritime Provinces, 1869–1914” (with Robert Reid), Journal of Sport History, 42:1 (Spring 2015), 87–113; “Cricket, the Retired Feather Merchant, and Settler Colonialism: The Troubled Halifax Sojourn of A.H. Leighton, 1912,” Acadiensis, 46:1 (Winter/Spring 2017), 73–96; “The Cricketers of Digby and Yarmouth Counties, Nova Scotia, 1871–1914: Social Roots of a Village and Small-Town Sport,” Histoire sociale/Social History, 51, no. 103 (May 2018), 47–73; “Space, Environment, and Appropriation: Sport and Settler Colonialism in Mi’kma’ki,” Journal of Sport History, 46:2 (Summer 2019), 242–54; and “The Life and Times of the Nova Scotia Cricket League, 1906–1914,” Acadiensis, 49:1 (Spring 2020), 69–122.