Mairi Cowan is Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Historical Studies and the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with appointments to the Department of History, the Centre for Medieval Studies, and Trinity College. She has received teaching awards at the institutional, provincial, and national levels: the E.A. Robinson Teaching Excellence Award (2018), the OCUFA Teaching Award (2021), the Canadian Historical Association Teaching Award (2021), and the D2L Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning (2023).

At the core of Professor Cowan’s teaching is work with students to discover, study, and engage with the human past in a historically responsible way. Her courses span the full undergraduate curriculum, from large introductory lectures to advanced upper-level seminars, with topics ranging from medieval and early modern Europe to colonial North America and instruction extending from basic university-level expectations to the methods of social history and microhistory. Through all these courses, Professor Cowan treats historical inquiry as a craft that students learn by doing, guided by curiosity, humility, and a willingness to risk getting things wrong. She also builds into these courses what she calls “calibrated flexibility”—a structured progression of choice that grows as students advance, so that first-year students practise a suite of carefully delineated skills while fourth-year students write essays, produce podcasts, design storyboards, even sew a baby’s gown from sixteenth-century patterns.

As an active researcher in medieval and early modern Scotland, New France, and the teaching and learning of history, Professor Cowan finds many ways to bring students into the research process. She has supervised eighty individual undergraduate students in independent study courses, Research Opportunity Program courses, honours theses, and research assistantships. She has also co-authored peer-reviewed and public-facing publications with students on both historical and pedagogical topics. Working with Professor Cowan, students do not just learn about history; they learn how to become historians.

Professor Cowan is one of Canada’s leading Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers based in a History department, with twelve peer-reviewed articles on teaching and over $450,000 in grants for teaching-related research. She is an advocate for “measured innovation,” arguing that innovation should be measured both in the sense of proportionate, and also in the sense of assessed. Her studies have shaped how instructors evaluate critical thinking skills, coordinate interdisciplinary co-teaching, offer flexible assessment options, teach academic integrity, and provide feedback on students’ assignments.

Her educational leadership grows from her observation that “teaching and learning are inherently social activities where the roles of teacher and learner are not fixed positions but rather fluid dispositions: we learn from those whom we are assigned to teach, and those who are assigned to be our teachers learn from us.” For Professor Cowan, the best teachers are always learners, and she has made teaching a genuinely shared practice. As Program Director for History at UTM, she led the development of Learning Outcomes for the History program. She founded the Internship Instructors Community of Practice and co-founded the History Book Club. She has served on more than twenty committees dedicated to teaching and learning. Her teaching resources have been adopted by the Canadian Historical Association, the Champlain Society, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Oxford University Press, and the Ontario Ministry of Education.

Professor Cowan is also a prominent public historian who makes a point of producing at least one public-facing and freely available output for every peer-reviewed publication. She has been invited to speak to public libraries, alumni associations, and historical organizations in Canada as well as abroad. Her monograph The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) was featured on CBC Ideas, covered by Le Devoir, and discussed on several international podcasts. Her writing on history and education has appeared in The Toronto Star, The Winnipeg Free Press, The National Post, Canada’s History, History Scotland, Times Higher Education, and University Affairs.