Joy Parr, eminent Canadian historian of work, gender, and technology, and senior Canada Research Chair and Professor Emerita at the University of Western Ontario, passes away. Dr. Parr received her PhD from Yale University in 1977 and taught at several institutions throughout her career including Yale, the University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University. Parr taught at Queen's from 1982-1992. She published many books and articles, including Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada (McGill-Queen's Press, 1980), The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (University of Toronto Press, 1990), Domestic Goods: the Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Postwar Years (University of Toronto Press, 1999), and Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments and the Everyday (UBC Press, 2010). Dr. Parr's exceptional scholarship earned her many awards throughout her career, including the CHA's Sir John A. Macdonald Prize and the Ontario Historical Society's Fred Landon Award for The Gender of Breadwinners, the Society for the History of Technology's Edelstein Prize for Sensing Changes, and the lifetime achievement Leonardo da Vinci Medal from the Society for the History of Technology in 2018. In 2000, she was the first woman to receive the Royal Society of Canada's J. B. Tyrell Historical Medal.
She will be missed.
