Angela Tozer

Thematic research and supervisory clusters: Colonialism, diasporas; Atlantic world; Politics, resistance and culture; Oral history/digital storytelling; Environmental history; Indigenous history; Ethnicity, race and nationalism

Temporal period: Modern

Geographical region: Canada; Britain; The Atlantic

PhD, McGill University, 2020
MA, McGill University, 2012
Honours BA, University of Toronto, 2010

Dr. Angela Tozer researches in Canadian history with a focus on the 19th century. Her research explores the relationship between capitalism and settler colonialism. Her current book project, The Debt of a Nation, examines the history of the Canadian public debt, which she argues facilitated settler colonial expansion over the territories of Indigenous nations.

Tozer’s research balances between archival and oral history, as she works with Indigenous community members and the knowledges and stories that they share with her. As a Tamil Canadian her focus is on building respectful professional relationships that prioritize a holistic approach to the study of the Canadian settler state that does not exclusively focus on archival and colonial documentation

Works in progress

This research, funded in part with a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, will be the first comprehensive Canadian historical study on the history of eel 'fisheries.’ Global demand for living commodities makes necessary fisheries that produce a continual market supply, often touted as ‘conservation.’

The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) larvae emerge from the Sargasso Sea and then follow ocean currents to places around the Maritimes and beyond. The mysteries that surround the eel reproductive cycle make eels resistant to human attempts to captive breed them for profit. A commodified living being with a difficult to control reproductive cycle has implications for population recovery efforts in the rising tide of unprecedented environmental change, particularly in aquatic spaces.

A second collaborative and interdisciplinary project with Dr. Rachel Bryant, funded in part with a SSHRC Connection Grant, examines the possibility of decolonial community building outside of academic ‘mentorship’ models that often seek to assimilate historically marginalised individuals into an existing hierarchical system. The methodological frameworks of Wabanaki Elders guide this research. Our first research event, Wolasuweltomuwakon: together in gratitude took place in October 2023.

Publications

The Debt of a Nation: Capital and Canadian Imperialism, 1820-1873 (Under contract with UBC Press).

Racial Capital, Public Debt, and the Appropriation of Epekwitk, 1853–1873. Journal of Canadian Studies 57, no. 2 (2023): 233–54.

Democracy in a Settler State? Settler Colonialism and the Development of Canada, 1820–67, in Constant Struggle Histories of Canadian Democratization, Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, eds (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2021), 87-115.