Degrees: Ph.D. Queen's

Email: pab@uvic.ca

I like this description of university teaching. I came across it some years ago and unfortunately I do not now have the source.
"The First law of College Teaching: Any professor who, subject to the restraints of common sense and common decency, does not seize every opportunity to offend the sensibilities of his/her students is insulting and cheating them, and is no college professor at all."

Social, business, labour, family, women, religion, historiography.

I have been teaching at UVic for over two decades. It is a great place to be. Currently I am co-director of the Canada Century Research Infrastructure Project at the University of Victoria. This is a multi-disciplinary, multi university project which is creating machine readable public use data bases of samples from the 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1951 Canadian national censuses. This integrated data set of some two million anonymized individuals will be available for public use at the Project's completion in 2008. The Project builds on the successful Canadian Families Project headquartered at the University of Victoria. More information can be found at the CCRI's web site - http://www.canada.uottawa.ca/ccri/ I am also writing a book on women and wealth in late nineteenth and early twentieth century urban Canada.

A Silent Revolution?: Gender and Wealth in English Speaking Urban Canada, 1860-1930, accepted and forthcoming McGill/Queen's University Press, 2008.

Household Counts: Canadian Families and Households in 1901, edited with Eric Sager, University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Sites of Power: A Concise History of Ontario, Oxford University Press, 2005.

"Chattel Mortgages and Community in Perth County, Ontario," Canadian Historical Review, 87, December, 2006, 583-620.

Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed & Their Families in Late Victorian Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1998, (with Eric Sager).

A Concise History of Canadian Business. Oxford University Press, 1994 (with Graham Taylor).

The Bank of Upper Canada, Champlain Society, Carleton University Press, 1987.

"Inheriting and Bequeathing: The Place of Urban Women in Late Nineteenth Century Canadian Wills," in, Emiko Ochiai, ed., The Logic of Female Succession: Rethinking Patriarchy and Patrilineality in Global Perspective, Kyoto, 2003, 129-145.

"Did Religion Matter?: Religion and Wealth in Urban Canada at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Histoire sociale/Social History, v. 34, n.67, 2001, 61-96.

"Familiar Strangers: Urban Families with Boarders, Canada, 1901," Social Science History, 25, 2001, 321-346.

"Home Ownership and Spacious Homes: Equity under Stress in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada," Journal of Family History, 26, 2001, 272-288.

"Displaying the Working Class: The 1901 Census of Canada," Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 33, 2000, 229-235, (also, with Eric Sager, guest editor of this issue on the Canadian Families Project)