Dr. Bruce Muirhead receives Lakehead University's Distinguished Researcher Award (SSHRC).

18 March 2004 - Thunder Bay

Bruce Muirhead, this year's Distinguished Researcher at Lakehead University, came to Thunder Bay with his family to teach in the History Department in 1985. Since then, he has published two books with prestigious university presses, McGill-Queen's University Press and the University of Toronto Press, and has another book in process with the latter. His second book, Against the Odds: the Public Life and Times of Louis Rasminsky, won the Faye and Joseph Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History.

He has also published articles in the top refereed journals of his profession, both national and international. In one of these, the American Review of Canadian Studies, an external assessor wrote that Muirhead's article had changed the way in which he viewed the issue upon which Muirhead was writing.

He has also been active in the university community. Muirhead has represented Lakehead at the Council of Ontario Universities, based in Toronto, where he was eventually asked to serve on its executive committee. As well, he served for a term on the council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, one of the federal granting agencies, with a budget of approximately $120 million. In January 2003, he was selected by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute as its lecturer in Canadian Studies and was sent on a lecture tour to nine Indian universities. He and his family also spent a year in Japan, with Muirhead as a visiting professor at Gifu University for Languages in Gifu, Japan.

Finally, he has held two prestigious Social Science and Humanities Research grants to undertake research for his books, and one research contract from the Bank of Canada to research and write his biography of the former governor, Louis Rasminsky. He continues to research and write and has shifted his attention from trade policy development to the evolution of Canada's overseas development assistance policy from 1945 to 1989. He and his collaborator on this project, Greg Donaghy of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, have already begun the legwork that will result in another book.

This year Muirhead was also the recipient of a Lakehead University "Contribution to Teaching Award." His students obviously appreciate the fact that his research, and his stories of peril in various archives, informs his teaching. As well, for the past number of years he has been cited in Maclean's Real Guide to Canadian Universities and Colleges as one of this university's most popular professors.