Edward Dunsworth

Edward Dunsworth is a historian of labour, migration, and politics, with an interest in studying Canada in a global context. A trio of projects completed between 2022 and 2024 examine the history of migrant farm labour in Canada. His first book, Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Canada’s Agricultural Workforce (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) uses Ontario’s tobacco sector as a case study to explore the histories of farm labour and temporary foreign workers programs in Canada. It was awarded the Henry A. Wallace Award by the Agricultural History Society, United States, was a finalist for the Wilson Book Prize (McMaster University), and received an honourable mention for the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies’ book prize.

His second book was a collaboration with the St. Lucian-Canadian migrant farm worker-activist, Gabriel Allahdua, to produce Allahdua’s memoir: Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada (Between the Lines, 2023). It won the Legislative Assembly of Ontario’s Speaker’s Book Award and was longlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize.

A third farm labour project was the digital exhibit, The Human Cost of Food (2024). Created with a team of nine graduate and undergraduate students, the exhibit explores the history of death, injury, and illness among migrant farm workers, from the 1930s to the Covid-19 pandemic of the 2020s.

An active public historian, Dunsworth is a member of the editorial collective at Activehistory.ca, a founding member of the Toronto Workers’ History Project, and a frequent author of articles for broader audiences. His current research concerns left parliamentary politics and the politics of immigration in interwar Canada.