Canadian Historian and Author (1943-)

Margaret Olwen Macmillan was born in Toronto in 1943, and was the great-grand-daughter of the former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose seventeen year-old grand-daughter, Eluned, was on a schoolgirls' cricket tour of Canada when she was stranded by World War II and then married Robert Macmillan.

Margaret spent a year in England in 1946 when her father, a doctor in the Canadian navy, went there to study and returned there at the age of fifteen to complete her school education before returning to her family in Canada. She later read Modern History at the University of Toronto, and after graduating in 1966 attended St Antony's College, Oxford where she completed a B.Phil. in Politics followed by a D.Phil. on the subject of the British in India. In 1975 she became the Professor of History at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she later became chair of the history department. In 2002 she left Ryerson to become the first female Provost of Trinity College and also Professor of History at the University of Toronto, positions that she relinquished in 2007 to become the Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Between 1995 to 2003 she was the co-editor of the International Journal, published by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and collaborated with Robert Bothwell on a series of radio programmes for CJRT/Open College on the topic of international relations. She has also been a member of the boards of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs, the Atlantic Council of Canada, the Ontario Heritage Foundation, Historica, and the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy, and was made an officer in the Order of Canada in 2006.

To date most of her work has been in the field of twentieth century international relations; at the University of Toronto her teaching areas included Asian history, modern European civilization and international relations, and she also taught a fourth-year seminar on the Cold War as part of the University’s International Relations Program.

She has become best known for her study of the Versailles conference which appeared in the United Kingdom under the title of Peacemakers: the Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2001), which was described by Andrew Roberts in The Sunday Telegraph as "splendidly revisionist and daringly politically incorrect" and won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history, and the Samuel Johnson Prize. The book later appeared in the United States as Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2002) and won the Silver Medal in the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and the Governor General's Literary Award for 2003.

Margaret MacMillan enjoys mountain-climbing and canoeing and was once married but was divorced in 1997 and has no children of her own.

Bibliography

As co-author with Marjorie Harris and Anne L. Desjardins

As co-editor

References

http://www.trinity.utoronto.ca/Provost/
http://www.international.gc.ca/department/skelton/macmillan_bio-en.asp
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin3/021007b.asp
http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/people/macmillan.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2064005.stm

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