Heidi MacDonald

Dr Heidi MacDonald is Dean of Arts and Professor of History and Politics. She in an historian of twentieth-century Canada with specializations in Atlantic Canada, the Great Depression, women religious (nuns), suffrage, and youth. Her SSHRC-funded project, Women Religious in Atlantic Canada since 1960, considers the intersection of women religious with feminism and the state in Atlantic Canada.

Her publications include the co-authored monograph (with Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Elizabeth Smyth) Vatican II and Beyond: The Changing Mission and Identity of Canadian Women Religious (McGill-Queen’s, 2017), and the forthcoming We Shall Persist: Suffrage and Human Rights in Atlantic Canada (UBC Press). From 1999 to 2018, Dr MacDonald was a member of the History Department at the University of Lethbridge and founding Director of the Centre for Oral History and Tradition.

Dr MacDonald welcomes inquiries from potential graduate students.

Recent peer reviewed publications

Heidi MacDonald, Persistence and Passion: Suffrage and Human Rights in Atlantic Canada. (Under contract UBC Press.)

Heidi MacDonald, “Edith Jessie Archibald, 1854-1936,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. XVI, 1931 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Forthcoming.)

Heidi MacDonald, “Introduction,” Steadfast Charity: Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, Halifax, 1972-2002, edited by Mary Sweeney et al. (Bloomington: Archway Publishing, 2019), ix-xx.

Heidi MacDonald, “The Personal is Political: How three congregations of women religious in Atlantic Canada responded to the Vatican II process of renewal,” in Le Concile Vatican II et le monde des religieux (Europe occidentale et Amérique du Nord, 1950-1980), ed. Christian Sorrell (Lyon: Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes, 2019), 339-348.

Heidi MacDonald, “Chapter 6: Women Religious’ New Educational Approaches in in the Global South, 1968-80,” in Educationalization and Its Complexities: Religion, Politics, and Technology, Rosa Bruno-Jofre and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 129-150.

Heidi MacDonald, “Transforming Catholic Women's Education in the Sixties: Sister Catherine Wallace's Feminist Leadership at Mount Saint Vincent University,” Encounters in Theory and History of Education, vol 18 (2017): Forthcoming.

Rosa Bruno-Jofré, Heidi MacDonald, and Elizabeth Smyth, Vatican II and Beyond: The Changing Mission and Identity of Canadian Women Religious (Toronto and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.)

Heidi MacDonald, “Chapter 8: Women Religious, Vatican II, Education, and the State in Atlantic Canada,” Catholic Education in the Wake of Vatican II (1962-1965), Rosa Bruno-Jofre and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 170-188.

Heidi MacDonald, “Past and Present: Women’s Suffrage and Confederation,” Acadiensis, XLVI, 1 (Spring 2017): 163-76.

Heidi MacDonald, “‘Being in your Twenties in the 1930s’: Masculinity and Liminality during the Great Depression,” Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make, Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers, eds. (Don Mills: Oxford, 2017), 156-169.

Sasha Mullally and Heidi MacDonald, “Vocation in the Broadest Sense: Terence Bay Community Development,” Historia de la Educación, vol 35 (2016): 35-51.