Angela Tozer

Thematic research and supervisory clusters: Colonialism, diasporas; Atlantic world; Politics, resistance and culture; Oral history/digital storytelling; Environmental history; Indigenous history; Ethnicity, race and nationalism

Temporal period: Modern

Geographical region: Canada; Britain; The Atlantic

PhD, McGill University, 2020
MA, McGill University, 2012
Honours BA, University of Toronto, 2010

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies who specialises in Canadian history with a focus on the 19th century. My research explores the relationship between capitalism and settler colonialism.

I work to build respectful professional relationships that prioritise a holistic approach to the study of the Canadian settler state that does not exclusively focus on archival and colonial documentation. It is important to me to balance between archival and oral history, and I work with both Indigenous and settler community members.

I am currently accepting graduate students who would like to work on the histories of: capitalism; settler colonialism; the environment; Atlantic Canada.

Works in progress

I am currently working on a comprehensive historical study on the history of eel 'fisheries,’ funded in part by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. This study looks at the impacts of the global processes of capital on treaties, specifically the Peace and Friendship Treaties.

The demands of capital for living commodities requires human control over the reproductive cycles of other-than-human-beings with the intent to produce a continual market supply — often framed as ‘conservation.’

The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) larvae emerge from the Sargasso Sea and then follow ocean currents to aquatic spaces in Wabanaki territory and beyond. The mysteries that surround the eel reproductive cycle make eels resistant to human attempts to captive breed them for profit. This work examines the impact of global processes of capital on treaty rights and the lives of human and other-than-human-beings.

A second collaborative and transdisciplinary project examines the possibility of decolonial community building outside of academic ‘mentorship’ models that often seek to assimilate historically marginalised individuals into an existing hierarchical system.

Our first research event, Wolasuweltomuwakon: Together in Gratitude took place in October 2023 guided by the methodological frameworks of Wabanaki Elders. Our in-progress edited collection Gathering in the Hemlock Grove: Community as Praxis and Critiques of Institutional Academia will be one result of this gathering.

Publications

“In wilderness, in community: Mentorship, academia, and ‘emerging’ as a scholar in settler colonial institutions.” Settler Colonial Studies (forthcoming). Co-authored with Rachel Bryant and Mercedes Peters.

The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820-73 (UBC Press, Spring 2025).

“Racial Capital, Public Debt, and the Appropriation of Epekwitk, 1853–1873.” Journal of Canadian Studies 57, no. 2 (2023): 233–54.

“Democracy in a Settler State? Settler Colonialism and the Development of Canada, 1820–67,” in Constant Struggle Histories of Canadian Democratization, Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, eds (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2021), 87-115.