Keith Fleming

- Professor

image of Keith Fleming PhD, The University of Western Ontario, 1988
Office: Lawson Hall 1208
Telephone: 519-661-2111 ext. 83645
Office Hours: Fall Term 2024 - Wednesdays, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
Email: kfleming@uwo.ca
Full CV

Research Interests

Professor Fleming is a specialist in Canadian history and North American business history, with research interests in Canadian political history, the history of Ontario, and the history of business entrepreneurship. Current research projects include a history of political protest and dissent in Ontario from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century, and a history of the Ontario Liberal Party.

Current Research Projects

Currently I'm working on several projects, including two monographs. The first monograph is a history of political protest and dissent in Ontario from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The second monograph is a history of the Ontario Liberal Party from 1867 to the present.
I am also writing a journal article on the political and business career of Walter Edward Harris (1904-1999), whose career included appointments as Canada's Minister of Finance and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration during the 1950s.
Other research projects currently include two entries in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The first is of George Howard Ferguson (1870-1946), who served as the Conservative premier of Ontario and the Canadian high commissioner in London. The second is of Walter Edward Harris.

Teaching Philosophy

Effective teaching entails achieving a creative balance between communicating facts (although many historical “facts” are disputable), and enabling students to arrive at their own reasonable conclusions about the practical and intellectual implications of a particular historical event, personage, or idea. Through the examination of historiographical trends I attempt to convey to students the importance of repeatedly questioning and reinterpreting what is commonly regarded as knowledge and truth, not just in history, but in any subject. By assisting students to become diligent researchers, careful readers, clear and cogent writers, and critical interpreters and synthesizers of multiple forms of information, my underlying purpose is to communicate to them that informed and substantiated opinions are a hallmark of an educated and hopefully engaged citizen.

Latest Publications

Books

(2015) “The world is our parish”: John King Gordon, 1900-1989: An Intellectual Biography (University of Toronto Press)

The biography documents Gordon’s extraordinarily varied career as clergyman, university professor, CCF political candidate and organizer, book and magazine editor, journalist and author, and United Nations official. With intellectual origins in the social gospel and Christian socialist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, Gordon was a leading Canadian political activist and advocate of internationalism and human rights by the 1970s and 1980s.

Refereed Journal Publications

(2020) "'Socially Disruptive Actions … Have Become as Canadian as Maple Syrup': Civil Disobedience in Canada, 1960–2012" in Journal of Canadian Studies (Volume 54 Issue 1, Winter 2020), pp. 181-212.

Focusing on the period from 1960 until Quebec’s “Maple Spring” protests of 2012, this article examines the practice of civil disobedience by a diversity of dissenting individuals and groups in Canada. Considered collectively, the examples of peace, anti-nuclear, and civil rights protests; defence of English-language minority rights in Quebec; corporate resistance to Sunday shopping restrictions in Ontario; pro- and anti-abortion advocacy; and the often overlapping activism of Indigenous and environmentalist groups illustrate how civil disobedience endeavoured to influence, whether by conversion or coercion, public opinion on some of Canadian society’s most complex and divisive issues.

Selected Publications

Books:

(2015) "The world is our parish”: John King Gordon, 1900-1989: An Intellectual Biography (University of Toronto Press).
(1992) Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911-1958 (McGill-Queen's University Press).

Articles and Book Reviews

"'Socially Disruptive Actions … Have Become as Canadian as Maple Syrup': Civil Disobedience in Canada, 1960–2012" in Journal of Canadian Studies (Volume 54 Issue 1, Winter 2020), pp. 181-212.
review of Brewed in the North: A History of Labatt’s (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) by Matthew J. Bellamy in The Canadian Historical Review (forthcoming December 2020).
review of Making Managers in Canada, 1945-1995: Companies, Community Colleges, and Universities (Routledge, 2018) by Jason Russell in Business History, April 2020, https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1757589
review of Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880 (University of Calgary Press, 2019) by Graham D. Taylor in The Canadian Historical Review (Vol 101, No. 1, March 2020), pp. 153-155.
review of David Culver with Alan Freeman, Expect Miracles: Recollections of a Lucky Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014) in The Prospectus: The Newsletter of the Canadian Business History Association, December 2017.
review of “‘A Justifiable Obsession’: Conservative Ontario’s Relations with Ottawa, 1943-1985” by P.E. Bryden in University of Toronto Quarterly (Vol. 84, No. 3, Summer 2015), pp. 308-310.
“The Rise and Fall of an Ontario Business Dynasty: William Kennedy & Sons and its Successors, 1857-1997,” Ontario History, CIV, (2012), pp. 63-89.
review of Profiting the Crown: Canada’s Polymer Corporation, 1942-1990 by Matthew J. Bellamy in University of Toronto Quarterly (Vol. 76., No. 1, Winter 2007), pp. 545-7.
review of Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire by Jamie Swift and Keith Stewart (Between the Lines, 2004) in The American Review of Canadian Studies (Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2006), pp. 357-359.
“Bishop William Townshend” in Michael Baker and Hilary Bates Neary, eds., 100 Fascinating Londoners (James Lorimer & Company, 2005), pp. 89-90.
review of Eugene A. Forsey: An Intellectual Biography by Frank Milligan (University of Calgary Press, 2004) in The Canadian Historical Review (Vol. 86, No. 3, Sept. 2005), pp. 555-557.
“hydroelectricity” in The Oxford Companion to Canadian History (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 300-301.
"Owen Sound and the CPR Great Lakes Fleet: The Rise of a Port, 1840-1912," Ontario History, LXXVI (1984), pp. 3-31.
"The Uniform Rate and Rural Electrification Issues in Ontario Politics, 1919-1923," The Canadian Historical Review, LXIV (1983), pp. 494-518.