Christopher
Dummitt
Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics. He is a professor at Trent University and taught previously at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin and at the University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas. He has written two other books exploring Canadian history and his work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Literary Review of Canada, and the Ottawa Citizen. Dummitt lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
Videos
Christopher Dummitt on his award-nominated book “Unbuttoned”
Award History
2017 Finalist
Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writingfor Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life
Jury Citation
“Few politicians have suffered as dramatic a decline in posthumous reputation as William Lyon Mackenzie King. The key to his undoing: a 30,000-page diary documenting his private life in obsessive detail. Christopher Dummitt tells the story, not of the man, but rather of his diary, and the gradual process through which its intimate contents became known to the public. Unbuttoned is a masterpiece of sophisticated storytelling revealing a broader narrative about the momentous changes in Canadian political culture that occurred over the course of the 20th century.” – 2017 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing Jury (Taiaiake Alfred, Joseph Heath, and Kady O’Malley)
