Ruth Sandwell

Membership:  2019

Member Bio

Ruth W. Sandwell is a professor at the University of Toronto and, in 2019, a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center. She is the author of a number of articles exploring the history of energy and everyday life in Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was guest editor with Abigail Harrison Moore of a special issue of The History of Retailing and Consumption, Off-Grid Empire: Rural Energy Consumption in Britain and the British Empire, 1850–1960 (2018). She edited Powering Up Canada: A History of Fuel, Power, and Energy from 1600 (McGill-Queen’s University Press), and published Canada’s Rural Majority, 1870–1940: Households, Environments, Economies (University of Toronto Press), both in 2016.

Publications

  • “The Coal Oil Lamp.” In “Artifacts in Agraria.” Special issue,Agricultural History92, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 190–209. (“Article of the Year Award” for 2018 from the Petroleum History Society)
  • “Heating and Cooking in Rural Canada 1800–1950: A Hybrid Energy Transition.” In “Off-Grid Empire: Rural Energy Consumption in Britain and the British Empire, 1850–1960,”edited
    by Abigail Harrison Moore and Ruth W. Sandwell.Special issue,The History of Retailing and Consumption4, no. 1 (2018): 64–80.
  • “People, Place and Power: Rural Electrification in Canada, 1890–1950.” In Transforming the Countryside: the Electrification of Rural Britain, edited byPaul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt, and Karen Sayer, 178–204.London: Routledge, 2017.
  • ed. Powering Up Canada: A History of Fuel, Power and Energy from 1600.Montreal:
    McGill Queen’s University Press, 2016. (Winner of The Canadian Studies Network—Réseau d'études canadiennes, 2017 Prize for Best Edited Collection)
  • Canada’s Rural Majority, 1870–1940: Households, Environments, Economies. Themes in Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
  • “The Emergence of Modern Lighting in Canada: A Preliminary Reconnaissance.” The Extractive Industries and Society: An International Journal 3, no. 3 (2016): 850–63.