Craig Heron

Craig Heron is a Canadian social historian and public intellectual with a broad interest in labour and cultural history. A former president of the Canadian Historical Association, he is a professor emeritus at York University.

Background

Craig Heron grew up in the 1950s in a working-class household in suburban Toronto. The first in his family to go to university, he graduated with an Honours B.A. in Modern History from the University of Toronto in 1970 and completed an M.A. in history at the same institution in 1973. He was employed by the Ontario Federation of Students and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography before undertaking an M.A. in Comparative Labour History at the University of Warwick in England. On his return to Canada in 1976, he joined the active social history group at Dalhousie University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1981. He began teaching at York University in 1982 and was appointed to the Division of Social Science and the Department of History at York University in 1984, where he served as a professor until his formal retirement. His presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association, delivered in 2009, is a notable review of the historical context of his own family background in post-1945 Canada.

Research and Publishing

Most of Heron's research, teaching and writing has focused on Canadian labour and social history. Like his contemporaries, such as Gregory Kealey, Heron was influenced by the work of historians such as E.P. Thompson, E.J. Hobsbawm, Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery and others outside Canada who promoted a "new labour history" to address the multiple dimensions of the working-class experience.