Associate Professor
John Bonnett is an intellectual historian and former Tier II Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities (2005-2015).
His research interests include the writings of the communication theorist Harold Innis, digital history and the digital humanities writ large.
Bonnett has published contributions in journals ranging from Digital Humanities Quarterly and The Canadian Journal of Communications to L’histoire sociale / Social History, Historical Methods and the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association . He is the author of Emergence and Empire: Innis, Complexity and the Trajectory of History. The work was an interpretation of Innis’ economic and communication writings, and received the 2014 Gertrude K. Robinson prize, the Canadian Communications Association’s prize for best monograph of the year.
He was the principle developer of two digital initiatives: the 3D Virtual Buildings Project and the DataScapes Project. The first project was devoted to developing student critical thinking skills via 3D model construction of heritage buildings, while the second effort was a Landscape Art initiative that used protein and text data to generate artworks expressed in Augmented Reality.
Bonnett teaches undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to digital history and historical GIS.