UNIVERSITY OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
UPEI professor emeritus wins SSHRC Exchange Publication Award

Dr. Edward MacDonald, professor emeritus of history, University of Prince Edward Island, has been awarded a $7,000 SSHRC Exchange Publication Award for his book The Geography of Home: Poems from a Lost Time.

Photo: Dr. Edward MacDonald

The SSHRC Exchange Publication Award is given out annually to support the publication of a manuscript written or edited by UPEI faculty in the social sciences and humanities. The book will be published by Island Studies Press.

In the introduction to his book, Dr. MacDonald writes that "home is a place in the heart. It is part actual and part invented, part remembered and part reconstructed, part learned and part inherited." Through his poetry, he traces the rural Prince Edward Island that he grew up in from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, a landscape on the cusp of far-reaching change.

He goes to say that the depiction of an era offered in the book is a mixed-media portrait, combining prose and poetry, history and memory. Each poem takes as its touchstone a place, person, practice, or plot and is paired with a short reflection that unpacks facets of the culture being explored.

Dr. MacDonald writes that while history attempts to trace changes over time, "memories are the little, coloured stones that we collect to assemble a mosaic of our lived past."

Dr. MacDonald is the author of If You're Strong-hearted: Prince Edward Island in the Twentieth Century and co-author of The Summer Trade: A History of Tourism on Prince Edward Island and has written, compiled, or co-edited nine other books. In 2024, he was appointed to the Order of Canada and then the Order of Prince Edward Island for his work as an Island historian and teacher. He retired from teaching last year and was granted the designation of professor emeritus at Convocation in May.

Island Studies Press congratulates Dr. MacDonald and thanks Dr. Marva Sweeney-Nixon, associate vice-president research and dean of graduate studies at UPEI, for supporting faculty publications.

For more information, please contact Bren Simmers at ispstaff@upei.ca or call (902) 566-0386.