Angus McLaren (historian)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Angus McLaren FRSC (December 20, 1942 – June 7, 2024)[1] was professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and a leading figure in the history of sexuality.[2][3][4]
McLaren was born to Lillian (née Brown) and Thomas Smiles McLaren in East Vancouver. He completed a honours degree in French history from the University of British Columbia in 1965. After graduation and marrying Arlene Tigar, he pursued, thanks to a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a PhD in history at Harvard University.[1]
With the allure of going to Paris, he continued in French history and conducted research during the tumultuous years surrounding May 68 in Paris. Dissatisfied with his research on an unknown French journalist, he was amazed to discover in his final year at Harvard that history has more tantalizing subjects to offer. He credits the visiting scholar, Theodore Zeldin, for whom he was an assistant, of revealing how history could examine the passions and practices of everyday life. Thus began McLaren's illustrious career on the history of sexuality, gender, and reproduction.[2]
Career
At the beginning of his academic career, McLaren taught at the University of Calgary and then Grinnell College. From 1975 to 2007, the University of Victoria was his academic home. He was also a Visiting Fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, a Life Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a Visiting Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto.[3]
SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) generously supported his research. McLaren was the author of more than a dozen books; some were translated into many languages.[4] As a socio-cultural historian of medicine, he drew upon legal, medical, archival, newspaper, and literary sources over a range of issues from birth control, abortion, impotence (erectile dysfunction), masculinity, and eugenics in Western contexts such as France, UK, and North America.[3] He was known to have skillfully challenged the boundaries of existing scholarship.[4] With the sociologist Arlene Tigar McLaren, he wrote the first book on the history of birth control and abortion in Canada, The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880-1980.[3]
Personal life
For several decades, McLaren lived in Vancouver with his spouse, Arlene, and son, Jesse, and commuted by ferry to his university in Victoria.[1] During the last few years of his life, he struggled with Parkinson's Disease.[5]
