Beverly Lemire
Beverly Lemire, History and ClassicsHenry Marshall Tory Teaching Chair
Prior to answering an advertisement for the Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, Beverly Lemire had been a professor of history and university research professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where she'd lived for 17 years. Interviewed in April, 2004, Lemire was named Henry Marshall Tory Chair in May of that same year. Since then, she has served as a professor of history at the University of Alberta, where she holds a joint appointment with the Department of History and Classics and the Department of Human Ecology.
It was during her second year of study at the University of Guelph that Lemire had become intrigued by her studies of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. "It was the point at which the entire world started to change," she says. "The Industrial Revolution was a period of great economic, social, and cultural change in the West. At the time, I was also taking history courses with a lot of other geographical designations: African, Eastern European, Spanish, and colonial American history." As a result, she couldn't stop thinking about the interactions between Britain and the wider world.
A graduate of Oxford University, to which she won a prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship and from which she earned her doctorate in 1985, Lemire became a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003. She is cited for her highly innovative economic, social, and gender analyses in the study of the changing material world. She frames this work within a comparative perspective, focusing on the period from 1600-1900 during the advent of the first industrial era in Britain and examines formal and informal economic activities.
A past Killam Research Fellow at the University of Alberta (1999-2001), Lemire co-edited Women & Credit: Researching the Past, Refiguring the Future (2002), an interdisciplinary initiative that gave her a taste for comparative projects. This volume was inspired by an international, interdisciplinary conference she organized at the University of New Brunswick — a conference that examined women's access to credit and micro-credit projects from contemporary and historical perspectives. The results provide the development and historical communities with broader comparative bases on which to assess women's long-term economic advancement.
Her two internationally acclaimed monographs established the centrality of the ordinary consumer in the early modern economy and of the second-hand trade and pawnbroking in making people make ends meet.
Currently engaged in a book project on cotton for Berg Publishers, in a series entitled "Textiles that Changed the World," Lemire has worked with collections at major museums in Canada, the US and Britain. With Lesley Miller, she co-edits Textile History, the longest-established international journal on the production, consumption, meanings, and conservation of textiles and dress.