Dr. Eric Sager

Dr. Eric Sager
Position
Emeritus Professor and Adjunct
Department of History
Contact
Credentials

BA, PhD (UBC), FRSC

Area of expertise

Canadian. Labour history, family history

Area

Canadian history, labour history, family history.

Faces of UVic Research video

Bio

I received my PhD in British history from the University of British Columbia in 1975, after completing a doctoral thesis on the peace movement in nineteenth-century England. I taught at the University of British Columbia (1974-75) and the University of Winnipeg (1975-76). Between 1976 and 1979, and in 1981-82, I was Assistant Professor (Research) with the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I taught at Erindale College (University of Toronto) from 1979 to 1981 and 1982-83, before joining the History Department at Victoria in 1983.  I have worked extensively with information from Canada's censuses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I was Director of the Canadian Families Project (1996-2001) and a co-investigator with the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project (2003-09). My last funded project before retirement in 2016 was on “The Problem of Inequality in the Canadian Liberal Order.”

Curriculum Vitae

Selected publications

Books:

Unwilling Idlers image Inequality in Canada The Professor and the Plumber
  • Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 321 + xviii pages, 1989).
  • Maritime Capital: The Shipping Industry of Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 289 + xviii pages, 1990) (by Eric W. Sager with Gerald E. Panting).
  • Ships and Memories: Merchant Seafarers in Canada's Age of Steam (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993). Discovering Darwin: The 1930s in History and Memory (Darwin: The Historical Society of the Northern Territory, 1993).
  • Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998)(co-authored with Peter Baskerville)
  • Household Counts: Canadian Households and Families in 1901 (University of Toronto Press, 2007)(co-edited with P. Baskerville).
  • Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).
  • The Professor and the Plumber: Conversations About Equality and Inequality (FriesenPress, 2021).