Anthony Cary
Commonwealth Scholarship Commissioner,
Anthony Cary holds an MA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford Business School. He served in the British Diplomatic Service from 1973-2011, in Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Washington DC, as British Ambassador to Sweden, and finally as British High Commissioner to Canada from 2007 to 2010. In London, he was on the Policy Planning Staff, and headed the European Union Department. He was twice seconded to the European Commission in Brussels, where he was chief of staff to Chris Patten as Commissioner for External Relations. He was made a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1997. He is currently a British Commissioner of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan.
Catherine Desbarats
Associate Professor, Department of History, McGill University
Catherine Desbarats is professor of Canadian colonial history at McGill University and the director of the French Atlantic History Group. She holds a doctorate in Economics (D. Phil) from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in History from McGill University. Her research and writing centres on two principal areas: historiography and the finances of the colonial and pre-industrial French state. Currently, she is working on a study of the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s writings on the history of the new world, as well as on a study of the economic culture of state debt in the French colonial empire of the eighteenth century.
Jeffrey Simpson
Columnist, The Globe and Mail’s national affairs
Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist, has won all three of Canada’s leading literary prizes (Governor-General’s Award, National Magazine Award and National Newspaper Award). He also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism. Mr. Simpson has published eight books – amongst them, Struggling for a Canadian Vision; Star-Spangled Canadians; and his latest book, with Mark Jaccard and Nic Rivers, is entitled Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge. He has written articles for Saturday Night, The Report on Business Magazine, The Journal of Canadian Studies and The Queen’s Quarterly. Mr. Simpson has taught as an adjunct professor at the Queen’s Institute of Policy Studies and the University of Ottawa Law School. He is now senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Ramachandra Guha
Author, Columnist and Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Relations, The London School of Economics
Ramachandra Guha is a columnist for the newspapers The Telegraph, Khaleej Times and The Hindustan Times. Mr. Guha has won awards for some of his works. His essay, Prehistory of Community Forestry in India, was awarded the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society for Environmental History for 2001, A Corner of a Foreign Field was awarded the Daily Telegraph Cricket Society Book of the Year prize for 2002 and he won the R. K. Narayan Prize in 2003. Between 1985 and 2000, Mr. Guha taught at various universities in India, Europe and North America, including the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University, Oslo University and at the Indian Institute of Science. He is the author of India after Gandhi, published in 2007.
Stuart Schwartz
Professor, Department of History, Yale University;
Winner of the 2008 Cundill International Book Prize in History,
Professor Schwartz, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1968, specializes in the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion. Among his books are Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973), Early Latin America (1983), Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992), as editor, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil (1979), Implicit Understandings (1994), Victors And Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), Cambridge History Of Native Peoples Of The Americas. South America (1999), and All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008) – for which he was awarded the first Cundill Prize in History. He is presently working on several projects: a history of independence of Portugal and the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, 1620-1670; and a social history of Caribbean hurricanes.
