Kelly Bennett

Ph.D. Candidate/Teaching Fellow
Colonial, North American, Women's and Gender History

Please contact by E-mail: Kelly.Bennett@queensu.ca

Education

M.A. Queen's University, 2006
B.A. (Hons.) Huron University College (Western), 2004

About

Kelly studies Colonial, North American, Women's and Gender History. Her dissertation, conducted under the supervision of Prof. E.J. Errington, explores the lives and experiences of some of the thousands of Loyalist women who left the (former) American colonies and settled in Upper Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the late 1770s and early 1780s.

Using personal letters and diaries, war claims, wills, census records, ship registers, newspaper advertisements and obituaries, Kelly's dissertation takes a comparative approach to studying Loyalist women's wartime and exile experiences. It follows thirty to forty refugee women from the (former) American colonies to their early settlement in Upper Canada and the Maritime colonies; and considers their individual backgrounds, understandings of the revolutionary conflict, reactions to the British defeat, and adaptations to new colonial environments. Although this group of women is mostly drawn from the literate and propertied classes, Kelly's work also considers the experiences of some of the native, black and lower-classed women that they encountered during the Revolutionary War and in exile.

Kelly was raised in Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec.

She is currently teaching History 280S: Gender in North American History.

Previous Courses Taught:

History 124E: Canada in the World
History 313: British North America, 1763-1867.