Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025
Sex and jazz, liquor and gambling: Montreal in the early twentieth century was a city that offered an exceptional nighttime scene in North America. Montreal After Dark chronicles the spaces where nighttime regulations were enforced and contested. City authorities understood the night as enabling disorder, and they reorganized policing and crafted bylaws to gain control over it. Police and politicians mutually reinforced each other’s drive to morally cleanse the urban landscape, especially for international events like Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics. In terms that are strikingly familiar today, Montreal After Dark elucidates how the desires of politicians would come to reorganize how consumption and leisure, labour and dissent, noise, sex, and art were lived in Montreal after the sun went down. .
External postdoctoral fellow
PhD History, University of Toronto (2023)
MA History, Université de Montréal (2016)
BA History, Minor in Canadian Studies and Education, McGill University (2013)
Supervisor: Nicolas Kenny
Contact: matthieu_caron@sfu.ca
Research Description
In 1986 Vancouver marked its centennial anniversary. That year, however, Expo 86 organizers decided to commemorate another significant event from nearly a century before – the arrival of the first CPR locomotive in Vancouver in 1887. They believed that connecting the world fair’s theme to the history of transportation and communication would attract visitors from around the world. While railways in both American and Canadian cities received land grants to encourage construction, the government’s deeding of some ten square miles in the heart of Vancouver in the late-nineteenth-century was exceptionally generous.
My postdoctoral research project seeks to reveal how this initial land transfer shaped twentieth century Vancouver and allowed a period of urban development and reconstruction. Gradually, as settlers colonized Vancouver and its peripheries, the city became an important actor in colonial land politics too, enmeshed within a wider network of power and within a greater regional economy. A constant throughout Vancouver’s history, the CPR would eventually sell the very same lands that had been deeded – in and around False Creek and the Downtown Eastside – for the creation of the fair’s site. Effectively, my project takes a longue durée approach to demonstrate how the history of this site at the heart of the city involved transaction between British Columbia and the CPR, colonial agendas, and contested developments.
Publications
- 2022 Caron, Matthieu. “The Location of Canadian Urban History: Sex, Environment, Indigeneity,” Urban History Review, vol. 50, nos. 1-2 (August 2022): 64-75.
- 2019 Ross, Daniel and Matthieu Caron. “Bad Behaviours and Disorderly Public Spaces.” Urban History Review, Vol. XLVII, Nos. 1-2 (Fall/Spring 2018-19): 5-9.
- 2019 Caron, Matthieu. “Taming the Jungle in the City: Uprooting Trees, Bushes, and Disorder from Mount Royal Park.” Urban History Review, Vol. XLVII, Nos. 1-2 (Fall/Spring 2018-19): 39-53.
Awards
- 2023-2025 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC)
- 2020-2021 Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)
- 2019 Corsini Fellowship in Canadian History, McMaster University
- 2018 Pre-Dissertation Research Award, University of Toronto
- 2018 CCA Collection Research Grant (Residency), Canadian Centre for Architecture
- 2018 Centre des Études de la France et du Monde francophone Travel Fellowship, University of Toronto
- 2016 – 2020 Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
- 2016 – 2019 Doctoral Research Scholarship, Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC) (scholarship declined)
- 2016 Jean Armour Entrance Scholarship in Canadian History, University of Toronto
- 2015 Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Master’s Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
- 2015 Arsène David Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales (FESP), Université de Montréal