David Wilson

Biography

David A. Wilson, from Whitehead County Antrim, is the General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Professor in the History Department and Celtic Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Prior to this he presented radio documentaries on matters historical and political for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Initially a colonial American historian, he began his publishing career with Paine and Cobbett:  The Transatlantic Connection, which fell still-born from the press in 1988.  Since then, he has written six other monographs, including a study of the United Irishmen in the United States, and a prize-winning two-volume biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.  He has edited five books with such stirring titles as Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World and Peter Porcupine in America, the latter often being mistaken for a book on North American fauna.  (Similarly, his Ireland, A Bicycle and A Tin Whistle is often mistaken for a travel book.)  In 2000 he received the University of Toronto’s Outstanding Teaching Award. His next book, Canadian Spy Story:  Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police, will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the Spring of 2022.