Daniel Meister
Daniel R. Meister specializes in the history and politics of “race,” “whiteness,” immigration and multiculturalism in Canada. His recently published book on these subjects, The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism, was a finalist for both the 2022 John W. Dafoe Book Prize and the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History 2022 Wilson Book Prize.
His current book project examines the history of multiculturalism as an official policy in Canada, focusing on three pivotal moments: the announcement of the policy in 1971, its enshrinement in the Charter in 1982 and the passage of the Multiculturalism Act in 1988.
Dr. Meister completed his PhD at Queen’s University, where he was awarded a Joseph Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a Graduate Student Scholarship from the International Council for Canadian Studies. After teaching courses in History and the Liberal Arts at Queen’s, where he was twice nominated for teaching awards, he was the recipient of a Lillian Agnes Jones Fellowship at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. He then worked as a Researcher at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and as an Instructor in the Department of History and Politics at the UNBSJ.
He is a co-founding editor of H-Biography, where he also serves as book reviews editor and is a founding member of CRASH, the Canada Region Anti-Eugenics Scholarship Hub, where he is currently the coordinator for the Atlantic region.
Selected publications
The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.
Historical Biography in Canada: Historians, Publishers and the Public. In Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies. Hans Renders and David Veltman, eds. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 21-40, 2020.
‘Anglo-Canadian Futurities’: Watson Kirkconnell, Scientific Racism and Cultural Pluralism in Interwar Canada. Settler Colonial Studies 10 (2): 234–56, 2020.
The Biographical Turn and Historical Biography. History Compass 16 (1), 2018.
