Dr. Paul Lawrie, photo courtesy of Dr. Carlos Colarado
Glenn Moulaison, Dean of Arts, is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Paul Lawrie as Associate Dean of Arts for a five-year term starting July 1, 2020.
Dr. Paul Lawrie is an Associate Professor of History who teaches and researches the social and cultural history of modern America. His specific interests lie in the fields of African American, urban, labour, disability and temporal histories. Dr. Lawrie received his BA (Hons) in History from York University and his MA and PhD in History from the University of Toronto. Before joining The University of Winnipeg, he was an Ontario Postdoctoral Fellow of the Provincial Ministry of Economic Innovation and Development at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Dr. Lawrie’s research has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Disability History, Disability Histories and Truth in the Public Sphere. His article “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896-1915” won the Ernest Redekop prize for best article in the Canadian Review of American Studies (2013). He is the author of Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (NYU Press 2016) which examines how ideas of race, work and the ‘fit’ or ‘unfit’ body informed the development of the early twentieth century industrial American state. Pivoting from the corporeal to the temporal, his current SSHRC Insight Grant supported project The Color of Hours: Race, Time and Space in the Making of the Postwar City charts the racial politics of time and space — the temporal geographies of race — from the street corner to the factory in postwar urban America.
Lawrie has been an invited lecturer at a number of U.S., U.K., Canadian and Australian universities and is a frequent commentator on U.S. politics/race relations on local and national media. He is a member of several campus faculty networks — such as CLASS (Centre for the liberal Arts and the Secular Sphere), CRiCS (Centre for Research in Cultural Studies) and CRN@uwinnipeg (Critical Race Network at UW). He was a past senior research fellow at the IUS (Institute of Urban Studies) and is current chair of the Axworthy Distinguished Lecture Series on Social Justice and the Public Good.
“The search committee was impressed with Dr. Lawrie’s understanding of the challenges and opportunities presenting themselves to an Arts education and to the post-secondary sector in general,” said Moulaison. “I look forward to his being a strong voice for Arts both within the University and beyond. I would like to thank Dr. Jenny Heijun Wills; Dr. Adina Balint; Dr. Michael Weinrath; Ms. Lisa McLean; and Ms. Jane Pangan, Senior HR Consultant, for their work on the committee.”
