Congratulations to New Order of Canada Recipients

Announced at Officer of the Order of Canada is Chad Gaffield, Professor of History and University Research Chair in Digital Scholarship at the University of Ottawa.
He returned to the university in September 2014 after serving as President and CEO of the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) during 2006-2014. An expert on the sociocultural history of 19th- and 20th-century Canada, Gaffield has been at the forefront of efforts to develop digital technologies that expand, deepen, and facilitate research, teaching and public engagement. His scholarship focuses in particular on Canada’s official languages in their changing socio-cultural, economic and demographic contexts since the early nineteenth century. He has also studied socio-demographic change in the Ottawa Valley as well as childhood and family history during the nineteenth-century development of mass schooling. From 2001 to 2008, Gaffield led the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional and cross-sectoral Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) initiative, one of Canada’s largest and most innovative research projects in the social sciences and humanities. By developing digital technology to mine historical census enumerations and documentary evidence, CCRI is now enabling unprecedented temporal and spatial analyses of the forces that shaped the twentieth century. Gaffield’s new project concerns the conceptual and technological making of the Digital Age since the nineteenth century with a special emphasis on Canada. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he received the RSC’s 2004 J.B. Tyrrell Historical Medal given for outstanding contributions to the study of Canada. In 2011, Gaffield was awarded the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ Antonio Zampolli Prize which recognizes every three years a major research contribution. In 2015, he received a Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Carleton University. Gaffield received his BA (Hons) and MA from McGill University and his PhD from the University of Toronto.

Announced as Member of the Order of Canada is William (Bill) Waiser who joined the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan in 1984 and served as department head from 1995-98. He was Yukon Historian for the Canadian Parks Service prior to his university appointment. He was named the university's Distinguished Researcher at the spring 2004 convocation and received the College of Arts and Science Teaching Excellence Award in 2003. He was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, the province's highest honour, in 2006, and elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada the following year. Bill retired in 2014 from the University. His books include Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada's National Parks and (with Blair Stonechild) Loyal till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion, which was a finalist for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Awards for non-fiction. His All Hell Can't Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot won the 2003 Saskatchewan Book Award for non-fiction.[3] He is perhaps best known for his award-winning centennial history of the province, Saskatchewan: A New History.