Staff
Susan Neylan
Co-Director
Susan Neylan is a Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. With degrees from the Universities of Toronto (BA, MA) and British Columbia (PhD), she has been a member of Laurier’s History Department on Waterloo campus since 2000. Susan is a social and cultural historian of Canada with a particular interest in Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations. She specializes in the Indigenous-Church encounter on Northwest Coast of North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recently she has explored Indigenous-Settler histories in the Waterloo region.
Eric Story
Co-Director
Eric Story is a 20th century medical historian with expertise in infectious diseases, disability, colonialism and war. He has published widely on the legacies of the Great War in Canada, including in the Canadian Historical Review, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association and Canadian Military History. His article “The Indigenous Casualties of War” was awarded the Canadian Historical Review’s Best Article Prize for 2021.
Eric completed his PhD (2024) at Wilfrid Laurier University. He also has an MA (2016) from Wilfrid Laurier University and a BA (2015) from the University of Saskatchewan.
Terry Copp
Director Emeritus
Terry Copp is the leading scholar of Canada’s military role in the Second World War and an influential advocate for military history in both military and civilian post-secondary education. His books on battle exhaustion, on 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade, and his two volumes on the Canadians in Normandy and Northwest Europe, Fields of Fire (2003) and Cinderella Army (2006) have led to a reinterpretation of Canadian soldiers’ effectiveness in 1944 and 1945. He was also the onscreen historian for the television series No Price Too High and a regular contributor to Legion Magazine.
Terry has explored Canada’s European battlefields for more than thirty years with hundreds of students and members of the public. This interest in the battlefields of northwest Europe has led to the creation of battlefield memorials and the publication of a series of battlefield guidebooks.
Terry’s most recent project is Montreal at War 1914-18, available now from the University of Toronto Press.
Matt Baker
Senior Research Associate & Projects Manager
Matt Baker received his MA in History in 2011 from Laurier after graduating from the University of Guelph in 2009. Matt was introduced to then-LCMSDS during graduate school, where he focused on recruiting in Ontario during the First World War.
Matthew Barrett
Managing Editor of Canadian Military History
editor@canadianmilitaryhistory.ca
Matthew Barrett holds a doctorate from Queen’s University, Kingston, and is the author of Scandalous Conduct: Canadian Officer Courts Martial, 1914-45 (UBC Press, 2022). Matthew’s graphic work has appeared in CMH, and in several publications including most recently with Robert Engen in Through Their eyes: A Graphic History of Hill 70 and Canada’s First World War (McGill-Queens, 2022).
Jackie R. McConnell
Research Collective Assistant, Communities + Policy Connections
Jackie McConnell (they/them) is a PhD student at Wilfrid Laurier University. Their research centres Lake Huron as a historical actor, exploring how the lake and its ecosystems have shaped, and been shaped by, human activity over the past 400 years. They received their MA from Laurier in 2025, where they researched deindustrialization and the final shutdown of the Collingwood Shipyards.
Emily Oakes
Research Collective Assistant, Publics and Social Justice + War and Society
Emily is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Laurier. Her research focusses on the historical relationships between humans and horses in Canadian society. She is also interested in Canadian military history, having written her MA major research paper on the soldier-horse relationship in the First World War.