Contemporary Authors

PERSONAL

Born 1964, in Canada.

McGill University, B.A., M.A.; University of Toronto, Ph.D.

ADDRESS

• Office - McGill University, Department of History 855, rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7 Canada.

CAREER

McGill University, associate professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies.

WRITINGS

• The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century, University of Toronto Press (Buffalo, NY), 1999
• St. Mary's: The History of a London Teaching Hospital, McGill-Queen's University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2003
• (As editor, with Alison Li and Shelley McKellar) Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social, University of Toronto Press (Buffalo, NY), 2008
• A Short History of the State in Canada, University of Toronto Press (Buffalo, NY), 2015

Contributor of chapters to books, including Liberalism and Hegemony, edited by Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, University of Toronto Press, 2009; The Quest for Tax Reform Continues, edited by Kim Brooks, Carswell Press, 2013; and John A. Macdonald at 200, edited by Patrice Dutil and Roger Hall, Dundurn Press, 2014.

Contributor of articles to journals, including Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Journal of Policy History, Canadian Historical Review, and Canadian Bulletin of Medical History.

SIDELIGHTS

Born in 1964, E.A. Heaman is an associate professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. She researches and writes about medical history, Canadian history, political economy, and social history. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She has written several books on agricultural exhibitions in Canada, Canadian governance, St. Mary’s teaching hospital, and scholar Michael Bliss.

The Inglorious Arts of Peace, St. Mary's, and Essays in Honor of Michael Bliss

In 1999 Heaman published The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century, which describes agricultural and industrial exhibitions as the century’s way of promoting civilization, capital, and commerce. Exhibitions reflected Victorian virtues of communications, cooperation, and competition. In the rising era of consumerism, exhibition sponsors advertised livestock and modern agricultural technology. Throughout British North America, people flocked to the exhibitions that promoted increased productivity, markets, and capital. Heaman also discusses the participation of women and native peoples in the exhibitions, and international exhibits.

Heaman’s 2003 book St. Mary’s: The History of a London Teaching Hospital delves into the early establishment of teaching hospitals and St. Mary’s reputation as a preeminent site for medical education in England. On the historical side, she chronicles medical research by clinicians in the 1850s, the appearance of salaried scientists in the 1880s, full-time medical researchers in the early 1900s, and the growing influence of scientists in teaching hospitals. The book also explores the emergence of the modern scientific teaching hospital, the social and political culture that encouraged it, social problems related to health, and political debates at the local and national level. St. Mary’s initially offered charitable care to the poor, then admitted middle-class patients, and later became part of the national health insurance program. Over time, the hospital participated in other medical-related endeavors, such as medical societies, a medical press, and granting agencies such as the Medical Research Council.

In 2008 Heaman edited Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social with Alison Li, an independent scholar based in Toronto, and Shelley McKellar, associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. The book highlights Bliss, a leading intellectual who wrote for academic and popular audiences and a teacher at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 2006. A Festschrift written by Bliss’s former doctoral students, the essays in the book discuss his career, impact on the study of history, and academic record. Other essays discuss public mythmaking; health and public policy; medical issues like endocrinology, lobotomy, and the mechanical heart; the relationship between fatherhood, religion, and historiography; and politics and business in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Canada. There is also an autobiographical essay by Bliss that addresses the business of scholarship, teaching, and writing.

A Short History of the State in Canada

Heaman wrote the 2015 A Short History of the State in Canada, part of the “Themes in Canadian History” series. The book presents “a useful, lucid history of Canadian governance,” according to J.L. Granatstein in Choice. From the First Nations, to the French and British colonial regimes, Heaman discusses Canada’s unique political experiences from the past and its move toward the future. She explores indigenous forms of government, European colonization, the conquest of New France, creation of the nineteenth-century liberal state, and the establishment of the modern social welfare state. Heaman also talks about political cultures, social politics, and modernization of the government, and she compares Canada’s solutions with American statism.

Writing in Choice, Granatstein noted that Heaman omits two essential elements of the state: the civil service and the military. Ian Radforth commented in Canadian Historical Review that the book “brings together material on an enormous range of topics that illuminate shifting understandings of governance and the state over the full sweep of Canadian history. Moreover, it is conceptually brilliant, interpreting the material in ways that are always stimulating and often novel.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Canadian Historical Review, fall, 2016, Ian Radforth, review of A Short History of the State in Canada, pp. 443-447.

• Choice, April, 2016, J.L. Granatstein, review of A Short History of the State in Canada, p. 1223.

ONLINE

• McGill University Department of History and Classical Studies, http://www.mcgill.ca/history/ (April 25, 2017), author faculty profile.