The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that historian Dr. Gregory Wigmore has joined the program as an external academic affiliate. Dr. Wigmore is a lecturer in history at Santa Clara University, specializing in colonial and 19th-century North America.
Dr. Wigmore is a longstanding friend of Canadian Studies at Berkeley. He was awarded a Sproul Fellowship in 2014, and has been invited to speak at the Canadian Studies Colloquium several times, including an upcoming talk in February (see "Events" below.)
Dr. Wigmore was born in Ontario, Canada. He completed his bachelor's in journalism and history at Carleton University in Ottawa, before moving to California to earn his Ph.D. in history at UC Davis. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of social and political history and foreign relations, especially the role of frontiers and borders. At Santa Clara, he teaches a broad range of courses in North American history, and he incorporates a significant amount of Canadian material into his classes.
His upcoming talk will draw on his research into the history of slavery in the US-Canada borderlands. His article, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland”, published in the Journal of American History, reveals how enslaved men, women, and children in early Canada and the United States exploited the new international boundary to seize their own freedom, decades before the emergence of the Underground Railroad. The article received the Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Ontario Historical Society’s Riddell Award.
Wigmore has contributed numerous op-eds to the Globe and Mail and the National Post. He is currently writing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, "The Limits of Empire: Allegiance, Opportunity, and Imperial Rivalry in the Canadian-American Borderland."
Dr. Wigmore previously worked as a historical researcher on contract to the Government of Canada’s Office of Indian Residential Schools Resolution, and has collaborated with the California History-Social Science Project in developing K-12 curriculum. He currently serves as faculty advisor to Santa Clara’s History Club.