A Word from the President / Un mot de la présidente

Abstract

During the year of the year of their one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Britain’s Royal Historical Society’s [RHS] released a substantial investigation into the state of race, ethnicity and equality in academic history in the United Kingdom. Authored by Hannah Arkinson, Suzanne Bardgett, Adam Budd, RHS president Margot Finn, Christopher Kissane, Sadiah Querishi, Jonathan Saha, John Sibdon, and Sujit Sivasundaram and based on surveys and interviews with 700 UK-based historians, the report detailed how the staff and students in UK university History departments amid a moment of enormous demographic and intellectual change remained overwhelmingly and markedly white and how racialized – here defined as Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) – scholars and students in History departments had “disproportionately negative experience of teaching, training and employment.” The RHS report concludes that addressing these and related issues is both “essential for the health of the discipline” and to “enhance public understandings of the past.”1 As the one hundredth anniversary of the Canadian Historical Association/ Société historique du Canada in 2022 nears, it is worth reflecting on the RHS report and its implications for the discipline of history in Canada.