Daniel Woolf
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Daniel Robert Woolf FRHistS FSA FRSC (born 5 December 1958) is a British-Canadian historian and former university administrator. He served as the 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, a position to which he was appointed in January 2009 and took up on 1 September 2009.[10] He was previously a professor of history and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. He was reappointed to a second 5-year term in 2013.[11][12] In late 2017, Woolf announced his intention not to serve a third term and to retire from university administration at the end of his second term in 2019.[13][14][15] He was succeeded by Patrick Deane,[16] and became Principal Emeritus.[17]
Daniel Woolf | |
|---|---|
Daniel Woolf speaking at a Queen's University event in Hong Kong in 2018 | |
| 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University | |
| In office 1 September 2009[2] – 30 June 2019[3][4] | |
| Preceded by | Thomas R. Williams[5] |
| Succeeded by | Patrick Deane[6] |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Daniel Robert Woolf[7] 5 December 1958[8] London, England[8] |
| Spouse | Julie Gordon-Woolf[9] |
| Children | Sarah, Samuel and David[7] |
| Education | Queen's University at Kingston (BA) University of Oxford (DPhil) |
Early life and education
Woolf was born in London, England, on 5 December 1958 to a Jewish family.[8][18] His mother, Margaret Mary Woolf (1929–2014),[19] was an English instructor at a university,[7] and his father, Cyril Isaac Woolf (1930–2012), was an otolaryngologist, a Royal College of Surgeons of England Fellow[18] and an adjunct faculty member at a medical school.[7] His uncle was the historian Stuart Woolf (1936–2021),[20][21] and his brother is the Vancouver-based architect Jeremy Woolf.[8][22][23]
In 1961, his family emigrated to Winnipeg, Canada,[18] where Woolf graduated from St. Paul's High School in 1976.[17] He obtained his BA in History from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1980, and then a DPhil in Modern History from St Peter's College,[24] University of Oxford, in 1983.[25] He was supervised by Gerald E. Aylmer, a distinguished historian of 17th-century England and then-Master of St Peter's. Along with historians John Morrill and Paul Slack, Woolf would eventually co-edit a 1993 festschrift honouring Aylmer.[26] Among Woolf's contemporaries at St Peter's was David Eastwood, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham since 2009.[24]
Career
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Woolf returned to Canada in 1984 and taught at Queen's University as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow in history until 1986, when he moved to Quebec and became an assistant professor of history at Bishop's University. After a 1-year appointment he joined the Department of History at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, as an assistant professor.[25] Woolf was tenured in 1990, when he was also promoted to associate professor; 4 years later, he became a full professor.[7][25]
In 1999, McMaster University appointed Woolf as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, serving as a professor of history in parallel.[25] He relocated to University of Alberta in 2002, starting a 5-year term as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, a position to which he was re-appointed in 2007,[7] as well as a professor in the Department of History and Classics.[25] In 2009, he was appointed by Queen's University as its 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor.[27] He took up the role on 1 September that year,[7] serving until June 2019.[3]
Academically, Woolf's research interests are in Tudor and Stuart British history and the global history of historiography.[9][28] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Royal Historical Society.[1] Between 1996 and 1997 he was a member of the School of Historical Studies under the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[29]
Since 2012, Woolf has been on the board of directors of Historica Canada (formerly the Historica-Dominion Institute).[25][30] Having completed one term on the board of directors of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, he is currently serving his second term (2021–2023).[31] He is a member of the board of directors of Lakefield College School since 2020.[32] He is also a member of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography (ICHTH), currently serving as its Secretary-General (2022–2026).[33]
Previously, he was the chair of the executive committee of the Council of Ontario Universities (2017–2019),[25][34] a member of the board of directors of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (2016–2017), a member of the Executive Committee and Council of the Royal Society of Canada (2012–2016),[25] and chair of the Standing Advisory Committee on International Relation of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (renamed to Universities Canada in 2015)[35][36] (2011–2014).[25][37]
Personal life
Woolf is married to Julie Anne Gordon-Woolf,[9] a health administrator and part-time professional harpist.[38] He has three children from a previous marriage to political scientist Jane Arscott, Sarah, Samuel and David.[8][39][40]
During his tenure as principal, Woolf was famous for handing out cookies with his wife at Queen's University's libraries during exam season.[9] He started this "cookie drop" in 2010.[41]
Honours and awards
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1990)[28][42]
- John Ben Snow Prize (2004)[43]
- Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London of the Society of Antiquaries of London (2005)[44]
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2006)[45]
In 2023, to honour Woolf's decade of service as Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Queen's University established the Principal Emeritus Daniel R. Woolf Professorship in the Humanities;[46] and renamed the first floor of Stauffer Library as the Daniel R. Woolf Gallery.[47]
In 2024, a Festschrift, titled Reckoning with History, was published in Woolf's honour, in which 11 contributors engaged with his writings and ideas.[48]
In 2019, Woolf was criticized for wearing the United Nations Service Medal Korea: an honour to which he was not entitled.[49]
Bibliography
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Books
- The Idea of History in Early Stuart England, University of Toronto Press (1990)[50]
- (co-ed., with John Morrill and Paul Slack) Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford University Press (1993)[51]
- (co-ed., with Thomas Mayer) Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe, University of Michigan Press (1995)[52]
- (ed.) A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, Routledge (1998)[53]
- Reading History in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press (2000)[54]
- (co-ed., with Adam Fox) The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850, Manchester University Press (2002)[55]
- The Social Circulation of the Past, Oxford University Press (2003)[56]
- (co-ed., with Norman L. Jones) Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)[57]
- A Global History of History, Cambridge University Press (2011)[58]
- (general editor) The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 volumes, Oxford University Press (2011–2012)[59]
- A Concise History of History, Cambridge University Press (2019)[60]
Selected articles and chapters
- "A feminine past? Gender, genre, and historical knowledge in England, 1500–1800", The American Historical Review, 102.3 (2005), 645-79 [61]
References
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