| Ramsay Cook | |
| Birth Name: | George Ramsay Cook |
| Birth Date: | 28 November 1931 |
| Birth Place: | Alameda, Saskatchewan, Canada |
| Death Place: | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Spouse: | Eleanor Cook |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Donald Creighton |
| Academic Advisors: | Arthur R. M. Lower[1] |
| Discipline: | History |
George Ramsay Cook (28 November 1931 – 14 July 2016) was a Canadian historian and general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He was professor of history at the University of Toronto, 1958–1968; York University, 1969–1996; Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Harvard University, 1968–69; Visiting Professor, and Yale University, 1978–79 and 1997.[2] Through his championing of so-called "limited identities", Cook contributed to the rise of the New Social History, which uses "class, gender and ethnicity" as its three main categories of analysis. Cook's conception of "limited identities" was famously formulated in an article in the International Journal in 1967, Canada's centenary year, reviewing the state of contemporary scholarship on Canadian nationalism:
During his teaching career, Cook supervised the work of 39 PhD students and many prominent social historians such as Franca Iacovetta.
In 1997, the Ramsay Cook Research Scholarship was established at York University to honour his contribution to the field of history.
He publicly supported Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his successful attempt to gain the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968.
He was married to Eleanor Cook, an English professor at the University of Toronto.[2]
Cook received the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1985 for The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1986. He was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government in 1994.[3] In 2005, Cook received the Molson Prize in Social Sciences and Humanities.