Allan Greer

Allan Greer, a Professor of History at the Univeristy of Toronto, specializes in the history of the earliest days of Canada and the colonial New World.  During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Mr. Greer will take a sabbatical from teaching to continue his research on the conflicting concepts of "property" held by Native Americans and the British, Spanish, and French colonizers, and how those concepts compare to those we hold today.

Mr. Greer received a B.A. from the University of British Columbia (1972), a master’s degree from Carleton Univeristy (1975), and a Ph.D. from York University (1980).  His first academic appointment was in 1980 as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine, but he returned to Canada to join the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1983, where he has remained.  He was Connaught Fellow there in 1999, and later a Visiting Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge University; a Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library; and a Fellow at the Huntington Library. He has been an invited speaker at many highly respected institutions, including the University of Michigan, Yale University, Harvard University, McGill University, Laval University, and the University of Texas at Arlington.

His first monograph, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740-1840  (U of Toronto Press, 1985) received the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize from the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Prize, and was a runner-up for the Garneau Medal awarded every five years by the CHA for the best book by a Canadian in any field of history. The success of that publication proved a bellwether, as several of his later studies also garnered awards. The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (U of Toronto P, 1993)  received the John Porter Prize from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and the Prix Lionel-Groulx, awarded by the Institut d=histoire de l=Amérique française. The Society for French Historical Studies honored his Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford UP, 2005) with its Gilbert Chinard Prize, and it also received  the Annibel Jenkins Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. La Nouvelle-France et le monde is forthcoming from Editions du Boréal.