Shannon Stunden Bower is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on the Canadian prairie west, and is influenced by the fields of historical geography and environmental history. She’s particularly interested in questions related to water management (with particular concern for the extremes of flood or drought) and government institutions (whether at national, provincial, or local scales).
Stunden Bower is currently at work on two major projects. The first is an analysis of mid-20th century prairie environmental transformation through the lens of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, a federal government agency created in the 1930s to undertake agricultural adjustment on the Canadian prairies. The second is a collaborative project on the history of Edmonton’s river valley and ravines system.
In 2011, Stunden Bower published Wet Prairie: People, Land and Water in Agricultural Manitoba, which won the Clio Prize in the Prairie Provinces by the Canadian Historical Association, the Manitoba Day Award by the Association for Manitoba Archives, and the K. D. Srivastava Prize (co-winner) by UBC Press. She has also published in a variety of academic journals and edited collections.
Prior to joining the Department of History and Classics, Stunden Bower was the Research Director at Parkland Institute, a public policy research institute associated with the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. In that role, she undertook and supervised research projects on a variety of public interest topics. Stunden Bower remains involved in public policy work through her role as a board member with Evidence for Democracy, a non-profit advocacy group promoting evidence-based decision-making and public interest research.
http://stundenbower.com/