College of Sustainability

Will Langford

Will smiles at the camera. He has a light skin tone, short dark hair, and glasses.

A historian specializing in twentieth-century Canada, Will Langford is interested in political activism, social movements, environmental change, and transnational connections. His first book was a history of development programs that approached the problem of ending poverty through empowering poor people and trying to create a more meaningful democracy. He is currently working on a history of right-wing politics in twentieth-century Canada.

Will has taught at the College of Sustainability since 2018. His courses engage with themes, present and past, connected with the environmental humanities. He has supervised five students (and counting) through the completion of excellent B.A. honours theses.

Will grew up in Calgary, but loves living in Halifax. He has three kids who keep him nice and busy. Will enjoys strong coffee, soccer, walkable city life, and how the smell of lilacs signals the arrival of summer.

Books

The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada: Development Programs and Democracy, 1964-1979 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020)

Journal articles & book chapters

“Freedom from Medicare: Maternal Activists, Organized Business, and Popular Mobilization against the Welfare State During the Saskatchewan Doctors’ Strike, 1962," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (forthcoming 2025)

“The Great Spawn: Aquaculture and Development on Bras d’Or Lake,” in Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century: Formations and Legacies of Industrial Capitalism, eds. Lachlan MacKinnon and Andrew Parnaby (Athabasca University Press, 2024), 269-300.

“Apartheid Internationalism: Canadian Activism in Defence of White Rule in Southern Africa, 1965-1994,” Canadian Historical Review 104, no. 2 (2023): 198-226.

“‘Will Freedom Survive?’: Reconstruction, Self-Disciplined Democracy, and the Stirring of a New Right in Canada, 1943-1954,” in Constant Struggle: Histories of Canadian Democratization, eds. Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 264-296.

“A Common Situation? Canadian Technical Assistance and Popular Internationalism in Tanzania, 1961-1981,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 15, no. 2 (2021): 317-338.

“International Development and the State in Question: Liberal Internationalism, the New Left, and Canadian University Service Overseas in Tanzania, 1963-1977,” in Undiplomatic History: The New Study of Canada in the World, eds. Asa McKercher and Philip Van Huizen (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 184-205.

“Trans-Atlantic Sheep, Regional Development, and the Cape Breton Development Corporation, 1972-1982,” Acadiensis 46, no. 1 (2017): 24-48.

“Jean Lagassé, Community Development, and the ‘Indian and Métis Problem’ in Manitoba in the 1950s-60s,” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 3 (2016): 346-376.

“Friendship Centres in Canada, 1959-1977,” American Indian Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2016): 1-37.

“Gerald Sutton Brown and the Discourse of City Planning Expertise, 1953-1959,” Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine 41, no. 2 (2013): 30-41.

“‘Is Sutton Brown God?’ Planning Expertise and the Local State in Vancouver, 1953-1972,” BC Studies 173 (2012): 11-39.

Public writing (selected)

Review of Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zed Books, 2025), Canadian Business History Association (September 2025).

With Catherine Carstairs, “The High Cost of Inadequate Funding for Grad Students,” University Affairs, 3 January 2023.

“Recent History PhDs in Canada, by the Numbers,” Active History, 18 October 2022.

With Catherine Carstairs, Sam Hossack, Tina Loo, Christine O’Bonsawin, Martin Paquet, John Walsh, Report on the Future of the History PhD in Canada, 6 October 2022.

“The Early History of Neoliberalism in Canada during World War II,” Beyond Borders: The New Canadian History, L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian, 1 February 2021.

“Congress 2020, Interrupted: Racism and Commemoration in Western University’s Department of History,” Active History, 5 May 2020.