For David Wilson, a good biography is more than a list of dates and accomplishments. It should be carefully researched, sensitive to both context and significance— and, above all, it should make readers want to turn the page.
That belief has shaped Wilson’s 13 years as general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), a major bilingual project in Canadian humanities, born out of a partnership between the University of Toronto and Université Laval. Over that time, Wilson has helped transition the organization from its origins as a physical text to a solely digital entity and fostered the continued revisiting of older entries in light of new evidence and changing historical understanding.
Now, as Wilson steps away from the DCB, we caught up with the professor of history and Celtic studies at the University of St. Michael’s College as he prepares to return to another part of academic life he still loves: undergraduate teaching.
You’ve said in the past that you were rather surprised when you got the offer to become the head of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Why?
David Wilson: My lack of immediate experience in Canadian history, plus the fact that I’m not fluently bilingual and it’s a bilingual project, were both reasons for me to initially say, ‘no, I didn’t want this position.’ I wanted to make sure that the folks in our Quebec office approved, because without their approval I would not have taken the job. They were very kind and very generous. They said, ‘as long as you make an effort to learn French, we’ll support you.’ I decided to give it a trial for one year and see how it went. Well, I love the team. I’ve never worked with better people and I still love the team to this day. They’re dedicated, conscientious, committed, very talented, and just generally great fun to work with.
I remember the previous general editor who encouraged me to get the job saying, ‘you don’t actually need to know the details of Canadian history. You need to know how biographies work.’ And I do know how biographies work.
What makes a good biography?
DW: Obviously there’s no formula, but there are some general principles. One is you want to make sure the reader wants to turn the page. You have to develop engaging prose without it lapsing into melodrama. It has to be extremely well researched. You have to be both a pedant for the details, and you have to be a broad frame thinker for the general picture that you’re drawing. You have to have a really good sense of the context and the relationship between the individual and the context. Not only how the context affects the individual, but how the individual affects the context. So it’s a reciprocal dynamic at work there. You have to avoid laundry lists. He or she did this then, and then this, and then this, and then this, would have a reader’s eyes numbing over quickly. It is not the kind of history I like to write anyway.
How does the Dictionary decide whose lives to include?
DW: It’s more ad hoc now, but you want to get regional representation, you want to get as close to gender representation as you can. But that is really, really hard for the period before the forties and fifties. We aspire to that. We try and bring in people from all walks of life. So they could be public hangmen or they could be prime ministers.
We have a team of people going through Who’s Who, for example, for some of the movers and shakers, but you’d also have a team of people going through newspapers. And all our biographies are based on primary sources. If the primary sources aren’t there, we won’t do them. This sets us out from all other national biographies.
How has the field changed over the past 13 years?
DW: One of the first things I had to do with great reluctance was take us off the print medium and make us digital only. I think the last volume we published sold about 1500 copies to libraries. That was it. Whereas online, we are getting somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 million visits a year.
We learned that most Google searches are by theme, not by name. So we reconfigured our website so that the biographies are all connected to themes. [We also moved] away from a strictly chronological approach of only dealing with people who died in a certain decade. We decided that henceforth half the biographies would continue along chronological lines, and the other half would be open to all periods, from the 16th century to the early 21st century. That’s a fundamental shift, and it’s really made us much more flexible. It’s given us many opportunities to do things we would not otherwise have been able to do.
Why does reliable historical biography matter in 2026?
DW: I think it matters more than ever in 2026 in the world of AI and also in the world of Wikipedia, which has improved, but in its early years was full of errors. AI is scourge when it comes to humanities. It has great uses in medicine, but even there, errors are creeping in. It has to be handled very carefully, but in the arts and humanities, it is one of the worst things that can happen to us. If a university education is about thinking clearly, arguing persuasively, and writing effectively, AI isn’t going to do any of that for you – on the contrary, it will deaden the art of thinking, analyzing and writing.
Why are you retiring?
DW: I think it’s been a long run. It’s been a very enjoyable run. And I think it’s really important to finish before any possibility of getting jaded comes in. So that’s one side of it. The other side is I’m on sabbatical this year, a recovery sabbatical. I want to get back to some more undergraduate teaching, just to wind up with that. I really enjoy teaching. There’s a push factor in that I want to leave before I feel I have to leave. But there’s a pull factor as well. I really would like to get back into the classroom again.
Speaking of the classroom, you have received a Faculty of Arts and Science Teaching Award. What satisfaction do you get from teaching undergraduates?
DW: I’ve been teaching at the university level for more than fifty years, from when I was a TA at Queen’s University in Kingston. Like my colleagues, I spend a lot of time preparing my lectures, and I try to make them as interesting and engaging as possible. My approach is very old-fashioned; I don’t use PowerPoint, and I try to give the students a sense of the period and people in question by interspersing quotations from contemporaries with analyses of the broader issues. I always try to make the people under discussion as human as possible; it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re dealing with real people facing real challenges, and that many of challenges they faced are still with us in different forms. In seminars, I strive to give everyone an opportunity to participate, while I raise questions about different types of evidence, the problems of presentism, and ways of thinking about the issues, using a combination of primary and secondary sources. Once students feel at ease, all sorts of wonderful things can happen. Another thing that I value about teaching is keeping in touch with students long after the courses have ended; I’m still in touch with some of the students I taught at Queen’s in the 1980s, and I have become friends with many of the Celtic Studies students I’ve taught over the years. What could be better than that?