Ian Gordon McKay (born 1953) is a Canadian historian who serves as Chair of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. He was formerly a professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, where he taught from 1988 to 2015. During his time at Queen's, Ian supervised or co-supervised over 33 doctoral theses and 49 master's theses and cognate essays. His primary interests are Canadian cultural and political history, the economic and social history of Atlantic Canada, historical memory and tourism, and the history of liberalism, both in Canadian and transnational aspects. His long-term project is to write a comprehensive history of the Canadian left. He is the younger brother of poet Don McKay. Education McKay earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Dalhousie University in 1975. His honours essay was entitled The Working Class of Metropolitan Halifax, 1850–1889. He then travelled to Britain to study labour history at the University of Warwick in Coventry. He earned his master's degree there in 1976, with a dissertation entitled Trade Unionism in the Baking Industry in Great Britain and Ireland, 1857–1974. He then returned to Canada, again to Dalhousie University, where he completed his PhD, entitled, Industry, Work and Community in the Cumberland Coalfields, 1848–1927, under the supervision of Michael Cross and Judith Fingard. In the 1980s, he served on the editorial board of New Maritimes. Awards and honours In 2009, McKay's Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920 won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, awarded by the Canadian Historical Association for the best book written in Canadian history the previous year. His co-authored work, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia, was awarded the 2010–2011 Pierre Savard Prize (International Council of Canadian Studies) for the best book on Canada in English or French. In 2014, McKay delivered the keynote address to the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, and that same year was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In September 2017, he was the recipient of an honorary DCL degree from Saint Mary's University. 2017 also saw McKay's book The Vimy Trap (co-authored with Jamie Swift) shortlisted for both the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In 2020, Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto (co-authored with Peter Graham) received the Flyod