Dan Horner
2021/2022 Ryerson Fellow at Massey College Associate Professor Faculty of Arts Department of Criminology Toronto, Ontario dan.horner@torontomu.ca
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Bio/Research
Dan Horner joined the Department of Criminology in 2014. He is a historian of 19th century cities whose research examines issues related to public order, migration, governance, and authority. He has published a number of academic articles and book chapters on collective violence and epidemic dise...
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Bio/Research
Dan Horner joined the Department of Criminology in 2014. He is a historian of 19th century cities whose research examines issues related to public order, migration, governance, and authority. He has published a number of academic articles and book chapters on collective violence and epidemic disease in 19th century Montreal and Liverpool. In 2020, McGill-Queen’s University Press published his first monograph, entitled Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics, and the Urban Experience in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal. It examines how the streets became a vital political space during a tumultuous decade in the city’s history. It delves into the way that riots, parades, religious processions, and other crowd events shaped notions of legitimate authority and justified the marginalization of women, the poor, and racialized people from the city’s public life. His current project, which is funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, examines the transformation of Montreal’s urban fringe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It traces the social and environmental transformation of this space, and the crucial role it played in the integration of people from all walks of life into a cosmopolitan community, from migrant labourers living in ramshackle shanty towns to the elites building grand estates on the slopes of Mount Royal. It outlines how people used the edge of town to escape the reach of the state, like bandits seeking refuge from the police and business owners establishing unlicensed garbage dumps. It examines how this area became a contact zone between different kinds of European settlers and the region’s Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this work will consider how the processes associated with capitalism and colonialism made an enormous impact on a small patch of the urban fabric.
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