Gordon DesBrisay
Dr. Gordon DesBrisay, Associate Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan, was born and raised in Vancouver. His undergraduate degree is from the University of British Columbia, and he earned his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He was a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow at ColumbiaUniversity and WesleyanUniversity before joining the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan in 1992.
He specializes in the urban social history of early modern (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) Scotland. He teaches survey courses on British and European history, and seminars on early modern towns in general, early modern London in particular, the British civil wars, and historical method. In 2004 he won a USSU teaching award. He is married to Susan Blake, professor of English at LafayetteCollege in Easton, Pennsylvania. They migrate seasonally between Saskatoon and Easton.
His research spans many different aspects of early modern social history, from wet-nursing to warfare. His particular research laboratory is the archives of the Scottish city of Aberdeen. The volume Aberdeen Before 1800: A New Historywas a collaborative project involving 24 authors. It was conceived and sponsored by the AberdeenCity Council as part of its official millennial celebrations. Dr. DesBrisay was one of two Canadians invited to participate and he wrote all or part of four of the eighteen chapters. The project was challenging in that it aimed to present the latest scholarly work in a form accessible to an educated but non-specialist audience.
Dr. DesBrisay is currently working on a study of poverty and poor relief in the seventeenth century that focuses on both the provision and the receipt of charity. His recent publication is "Lilias Skene: A Quaker Poet and Her 'Cursed Self'", in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, edited by Sarah Dunnigan, Evelyn S. Newlyn and C. Marie Harker (Palgrave, 2004) is showcased in the 2007 University Authors Exhibition