Mairi Cowan

Mairi Cowan is a historian of the late medieval and early modern world, with specializations in the social and religious histories of Scotland and New France. She is the author of the books Death, Life, and Religious Change in Scottish Towns c. 1350-1560 (Manchester University Press, 2012), which examines changes to lay religious culture in the towns of Scotland after the Black Death, and The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada, a microhistory of bewitchment in New France. She is also the co-editor of Gender in Scotland 1200-1800: Place, Faith and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Her historical research has been published in journals such as Britain and the World, The Canadian Historical Review, The Public Historian, The International Review of Scottish Studies, and in edited collections. 

Beyond her historical research, Professor Cowan studies how best to teach and learn history. She has researched the development of critical thinking skills in large history courses, the gaps that separate high school preparation from university expectations, the methods of teaching academic integrity as a positive value, the effectiveness of different kinds of feedback on students’ work, and the benefits as well as costs of flexible assessment. Her research on teaching and learning has been published in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, The History Teacher, The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the Handbook of Academic Integrity. She is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the E.A. Robinson Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching at the University of Toronto Mississauga; the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Teaching Award, which is given to Ontario’s most outstanding university teachers; and the Canadian Historical Association’s Excellence in Teaching with Primary Sources Award. 

Whether in a large first-year lecture, an advanced seminar, or an independent reading project, Mairi focuses on guiding students through authentic historical problems while helping them to develop the skills they need to discover, understand, and engage with the human past in a historically responsible way.