Debra Nash-Chambers

My research interests include law and social justice issues as well as commemoration and public history. Work in progress: “Redefining Family in the Wake of Industrialization: Late Victorian Guelph, Ontario”, in the series Family and Childhood in Canada, Cynthia Comacchio, series ed., Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

• 2017 Laurier Sustained Excellence in Teaching Award for Part-Time Faculty
  • Presented June 2017 Laurier Press Release: "Nash-Chambers has taught courses in history, political science, North American studies and criminology at Laurier for the past 12 years. Her teaching, which is highlighted by an enthusiastic commitment to community-engaged pedagogy and the development of community service-learning courses that promote high-impact teaching practices, has had a positive effect across all of the departments that she has worked with. Nash-Chambers encourages student achievement through mentoring and embraces experiential learning opportunities for her students."

My connections in the heritage community in Waterloo Region and Wellington County have facilitated experiential learning placements in museums and archives for public history courses. As a member of the editorial board of the Guelph Historical Society journal Historic Guelph, The Royal City, I have been able to vet promising local history and public research papers by Laurier students for publication in the journal.

• Review - Chambers, Lori. A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario, 1921-2015. Toronto: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the University of Toronto Press, 2016 in "Letters in Canada 2016", University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 87 No. 4. Fall 2018, pp. 447-448.
• 'Memorializing Lt.-Col. John McCrae: Civic Commemoration and the 100th Anniversary of "In Flanders Fields"’, Canadian Military History, Vol. 24, Issue 1, (Spring 2015), Article 12
• Review - Veronica Strong-Boag. Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage”, Histoire Sociale/Social History, November 2012, 45(90).
• “At the Confluence of Two Rivers, Guelph, 1827-1927: Industry and the Environment”, History on the Grand, Second Annual Local History Symposium, Industry and the Environment, sponsored by the Archives of the City Cambridge, Ontario, University of Waterloo School of Architecture, October 17th, 2009, published in online Conference Proceedings, City of Cambridge Archives, November 2009.
• Elysia DeLaurentis and Debra Nash-Chambers, eds., Remembering Pilkington Township: Lives, Loves and Labour, Fergus: Wellington County Historical Society, 2006. Short Listed for the Fred Landon Award, Ontario Historical Society, 2008.