Catherine Carstairs
Campus: Guelph
Office: 2004 MacKinnon Extension
Email: ccarstai@uoguelph.ca
I am a cultural and social historian with particular interest in health and the body. My first book, Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation and Power in Canada, 1920-1961 was a social history of drug use. It examined the impact of harsh drug laws on drug users’ working lives, relationships, and health. My current project is on popular writing about health and nutrition in the period after World War II. As part of this, I am examining fluoridation debates in Canada, changing attitudes towards aging, and growing concern about the health risks posed by pesticides and food additives.
Selected publications:
“Roots Nationalism: Branding English Canada Cool in the 1980s and 1990s” Histoire Sociale/Social History 39 (2006,): 235-255.
Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation and Power in Canada, 1920-1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)
“The Stages of the International Drug Control System” Drug and Alcohol Review 24(2005), pp. 57-65.
“The Wide World of Doping: Drug Scandals, Natural Bodies and the Business of Sports Entertainment” Addiction Research and Theory 11 (2003), 263-281.
“Becoming a ‘Hype’: Heroin Consumption, Subcultural Formation and the Politics of Resistance in Canada, 1945-1961″ Contemporary Drug Problems 29 (2002), 91-116.
“‘The Most Dangerous Drug of All’: Images of Cocaine and African- Americans in the Progressive Era” Left History 7(2001), 46-60.
1999 “Deporting Ah Sin to Save the White Race: Moral Panic, Racialization and the Extension of Canada’s Drug Laws” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 16 (1999), 65-88.
“Innocent Addicts, Dope Fiends and Nefarious Traffickers”: Illegal Drug Use in 1920s English Canada” Journal of Canadian Studies 33(1998), 145-162.