Dr. Veronica Strong-Boag, a historian and founding director of UBC’s Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, has been awarded the 2012 Tyrrell Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding work in the history of Canada.
Specializing in the study of 19th and 20th century women in Canada, Strong-Boag is the first scholar from British Columbia and only the second woman to win this distinction since the award was established in 1927. The prize, which consists of a gold-plated silver medal, is named in honor of Canadian geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell and is awarded to a Canadian scholar every two years.
As a feminist, Strong-Boag has been investigating questions of power since she was a graduate student in Canadian history at the University of Toronto. She is the founder of the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (1975), a former president of the Canadian Historical Association (1994) and a member of the Royal Society of Canada (2001). She has been active in Women’s Studies since the 1970s and a faculty member in that area since 1981.
Strong-Boag has authored or edited some 20 volumes and numerous articles and book chapters. She has won the John A. Macdonald Prize for the best book in Canadian history (The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939), the Raymond Klibansky Prize for the best book in the Humanities (Paddling Her Own Canoe: the Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson, with co-author Carole Gerson), and the Canada Prize in the Social Sciences (Fostering Nation: Canada Confronts its History of Childhood Disadvantage). She has also been awarded a Senior Killam Prize (2003-05) and the Jules and Gabrielle Leger Research Fellowship (2010-12).
Most recently, Strong-Boag has been making the same connection between history and today’s relations of power in her SSHRC-funded website, http://womensuffrage.org/. She believes that engagement in Women’s Studies has made her a far better historian and she treasures that feminist community.
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