Daniel Woolf

Daniel Woolf FRHistS FSA FRSC[1]
Daniel Woolf speaking at a Queen's University event in Hong Kong in 2018
20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University
In office 1 September 2009[2] – 30 June 2019[3][4]
Preceded by	Thomas R. Williams[5]
Succeeded by	Patrick Deane[6]
Personal details
Born	Daniel Robert Woolf[7] (1958-12-05) 5 December 1958 (age 66)[8] London, England[8]
Spouse	Julie Gordon-Woolf[9]
Children	Sarah, Samuel and David[7]
Education	Queen's University at Kingston (BA) University of Oxford (DPhil)

Daniel Robert Woolf FRHistS FSA FRSC (born 5 December 1958) is a British-Canadian historian and former university administrator. He served as the 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, a position to which he was appointed in January 2009 and took up on 1 September 2009.^[10] He was previously a professor of history and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. He was reappointed to a second 5-year term in 2013.^[11][12] In late 2017, Woolf announced his intention not to serve a third term and to retire from university administration at the end of his second term in 2019.^[13][14][15] He was succeeded by Patrick Deane,^[16] and became Principal Emeritus.^[17]

Woolf was born in London, England, on 5 December 1958 to a Jewish family.^[8][18] His mother, Margaret Mary Woolf (1929–2014),^[19] was an English instructor at a university,^[7] and his father, Cyril Isaac Woolf (1930–2012), was an otolaryngologist, a Royal College of Surgeons of England Fellow^[18] and an adjunct faculty member at a medical school.^[7] His uncle was the historian Stuart Woolf (1936–2021),^[20][21] and his brother is the Vancouver-based architect Jeremy Woolf.^[8][22][23]

In 1961, his family emigrated to Winnipeg, Canada,^[18] where Woolf graduated from St. Paul's High School in 1976.^[17] He obtained his BA in History from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1980, and then a DPhil in Modern History from St Peter's College,^[24] University of Oxford, in 1983.^[25] He was supervised by Gerald E. Aylmer, a distinguished historian of 17th-century England and then-Master of St Peter's. Along with historians John Morrill and Paul Slack, Woolf would eventually co-edit a 1993 festschrift honouring Aylmer.^[26] Among Woolf's contemporaries at St Peter's was David Eastwood, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham since 2009.^[24]

Woolf returned to Canada in 1984 and taught at Queen's University as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow in history until 1986, when he moved to Quebec and became an assistant professor of history at Bishop's University. After a 1-year appointment he joined the Department of History at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, as an assistant professor.^[25] Woolf was tenured in 1990, when he was also promoted to associate professor; 4 years later, he became a full professor.^[7][25]

In 1999, McMaster University appointed Woolf as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, serving as a professor of history in parallel.^[25] He relocated to University of Alberta in 2002, starting a 5-year term as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, a position to which he was re-appointed in 2007,^[7] as well as a professor in the Department of History and Classics.^[25] In 2009, he was appointed by Queen's University as its 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor.^[27] He took up the role on 1 September that year,^[7] serving until June 2019.^[3]

Academically, Woolf's research interests are in Tudor and Stuart British history and the global history of historiography.^[9][28] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Royal Historical Society.^[1] Between 1996 and 1997 he was a member of the School of Historical Studies under the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.^[29]

Since 2012, Woolf has been on the board of directors of Historica Canada (formerly the Historica-Dominion Institute).^[25][30] Having completed one term on the board of directors of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, he is currently serving his second term (2021–2023).^[31] He is a member of the board of directors of Lakefield College School since 2020.^[32] He is also a member of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography (ICHTH), currently serving as its Secretary-General (2022–2026).^[33]

Previously, he was the chair of the executive committee of the Council of Ontario Universities (2017–2019),^[25][34] a member of the board of directors of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (2016–2017), a member of the Executive Committee and Council of the Royal Society of Canada (2012–2016),^[25] and chair of the Standing Advisory Committee on International Relation of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (renamed to Universities Canada in 2015)^[35][36] (2011–2014).^[25][37]

Woolf is married to Julie Anne Gordon-Woolf,^[9] a health administrator and part-time professional harpist.^[38] He has three children from a previous marriage to political scientist Jane Arscott, Sarah, Samuel and David.^[8][39][40]

During his tenure as principal, Woolf is famous for handing out cookies with his wife at Queen's University’s libraries during exam season.^[9] He started this "cookie drop" in 2010.^[41]

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1990)^[28][42]
• John Ben Snow Prize (2004)^[43]
• Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London of the Society of Antiquaries of London (2005)^[44]
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2006)^[45]

In 2023, to honour Woolf's decade of service as Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Queen's University established the Principal Emeritus Daniel R. Woolf Professorship in the Humanities;^[46] and renamed the first floor of Stauffer Library as the Daniel R. Woolf Gallery.^[47]

In 2024, a Festschrift, titled Reckoning with History, was published in Woolf's honour, in which 11 contributors engaged with his writings and ideas.^[48]

Books

• The Idea of History in Early Stuart England, University of Toronto Press (1990)^[49]
• (co-ed., with John Morrill and Paul Slack) Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford University Press (1993)^[50]
• (co-ed., with Thomas Mayer) Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe, University of Michigan Press (1995)^[51]
• (ed.) A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, Routledge (1998)^[52]
• Reading History in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press (2000)^[53]
• (co-ed., with Adam Fox) The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500-1850, Manchester University Press (2002)^[54]
• The Social Circulation of the Past, Oxford University Press (2003)^[55]
• (co-ed., with Norman L. Jones) Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)^[56]
• A Global History of History, Cambridge University Press (2011)^[57]
• (general editor) The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 volumes, Oxford University Press (2011–2012)^[58]
• A Concise History of History, Cambridge University Press (2019)^[59]

Selected articles and chapters

• "A feminine past? Gender, genre, and historical knowledge in England, 1500–1800", The American Historical Review, 102.3 (2005), 645-79 ^[60]