2024 Winner:
Gregory Kennedy
Lost in the Crowd
WATERLOO – The C.P. Stacey Award Committee and the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada (LCSC) have awarded historian Gregory Kennedy the 2024 C.P. Stacey Award for scholarly work in Canadian military history.
Lost in the Crowd: Acadian Soldiers of Canada’s First World War (McGill-Queen’s University Press) is a meticulously researched study of the 165th Acadian Battalion and the wartime experience of Acadian communities in Atlantic Canada. Kennedy’s work situates this special-identity battalion, the only francophone unit authorized for the Canadian Expeditionary Force outside of Quebec, as part of an Acadian national movement to “demonstrate loyalty and to improve the visibility and circumstances of a minority group.” While many Acadian volunteers were widely dispersed among English-speaking units from the Maritime Provinces on the Western Front, most of the volunteers for the 165th Acadian Battalion were assigned to the Canadian Forestry Corps in France, alongside other units raised among diverse populations including No. 2 Construction Battalion.
“Kennedy demonstrates expertise in the fields of social and military history and models how these methodologies can align in pursuit of new historical inquiry,” the C.P Stacey Award Committee noted.
“Kennedy commands an uncommonly deep understanding of both francophone and anglophone historiographies of Canada’s First World War. His extensive, longitudinal research illuminates how the war unfolded amid social and economic transitions that saw many young Acadian men and their families on the move from rural communities in search of work as the war broke out. Population shifts, Acadian national goals, and conscription debates form the complex context in which more than 5,000 Acadians volunteered for service overseas – roughly 25 per cent of the military-aged population. Lost in the Crowd marks an important new contribution to understanding French-Canadian participation in the First World War outside Quebec.”
Gregory M.W. Kennedy
Gregory M.W. Kennedy is a professor of history and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Brandon University. He is an historian of Canada, New France and the French Atlantic World and former director of l’Institut d’etudes acadiennes at the Université de Moncton. In addition to Lost in the Crowd, he is the author of Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604-1755 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), and also co-editor of Repenser l’Acadie dans le monde : études comparées, études transnationales (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025).
The committee named Matthew Wiseman’s Frontier Science: Northern Canada, Military Research, and the Cold War, 1945-1970 (University of Toronto Press) an honourable mention for the 2024 C.P. Stacey Award.
An important new contribution to the history of Canada’s Defence Research Board and North American defence, Frontier Science offers important insight on ways in which defence scientists and policy makers sought to master the Arctic domain as part of Canada’s North American and North Atlantic alliance contributions. Wisemen employs a range of evidence and perspectives, including those of Indigenous peoples, to capture the intersection between the history of science, defence policy, and settler-colonial understanding of Canada’s north in the quarter century following the Second World War.
Matthew Wiseman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. In addition to Frontier Science Wiseman is also the editor of The Selected Works of George R. Lindsey: Operational Research, Strategic Studies, and Canadian Defence in the Cold War (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
About the C.P. Stacey Award
The C.P. Stacey Award is named in honour of Charles Perry Stacey, historical officer to the Canadian Army during the Second World War and a longtime professor of history at the University of Toronto. Historian C.P. Stacey was exceptional in his ability to contextualize and frame military history in its contemporary political contexts. The award is presented annually to the best book in the field of Canadian military history, broadly defined, including the study of war and society. The award winner receives a $1,000 prize, made possible through the generous support of John and Pattie Cleghorn and family and the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. The LCSC took over administration of the award in 2018 from the Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War.
The 2024 C.P. Stacey Award Committee consisted of Yves Tremblay (Directorate of History and Heritage, National Defence Headquarters, Ottawa), Lee Windsor (University of New Brunswick), and Caroline D’Amours (Royal Military College of Canada). To learn more, visit the C.P. Stacey Award homepage.
Press contacts:
Lee Windsor, Associate Professor
Department of Historical Studies
University of New Brunswick
Lori Chalmers Morrison, Director: Integrated Communications
External Relations, Wilfrid Laurier University
548-889-4857