William Jenkins was born in Clondalkin on the western edge of Dublin. He completed a BA and MA at University College Dublin before arriving at the University of Toronto in 1996 to pursue a PhD on the historical geography of Irish immigrant settlements in nineteenth century North America. In the end, he chose to examine the American and Canadian experiences of the Irish through the lens of Buffalo and Toronto. After defending his dissertation in 2001, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 2003, he returned to Toronto when he was appointed to an assistant professorship in the Geography department at York University. Between 2012 and 2015, he served as director of the Graduate Program in History.

He has published on the landscape and economy of rural Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with studies focused on localities in counties Tipperary and Meath, as well as on the Irish in North America. Articles on his research on the Irish in the United States and Canada have appeared in a variety of academic journals and edited collections relating to history, geography, and Irish Studies. In 2013, his book Between Raid and Rebellion: the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto 1867-1916 was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press and has since been awarded prizes by the American Conference of Irish Studies, the Canadian Historical Association, the Geographical Society of Ireland, and the Ontario Historical Society. In May 2018, he organized a two-day symposium at the Archives of Ontario on the Canadian dimensions of the Great Irish Famine; edited papers from this symposium will appear in book form in due course. He is presently researching transatlantic dimensions of the Great Irish Famine as they relate to the evolution of Toronto between 1840 and 1870.

Dr. William Jenkins will be available for a special audience Q&A session after the screening of BLACK ’47 on Saturday Jan 26th at 8:30 pm.