Picture of Erika Dyck

Erika Dyck PhD (McMaster), MA (USask), BA (Dalhousie)

Professor, Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine

Faculty Member in History

Office
Arts 615

Research Area(s)

  • History of health and medicine
  • History of madness and psychiatry
  • History of eugenics
  • Psychedelics
  • Social Justice

About me

 

Publications

For a list of publications go here.

Teaching & Supervision

Various courses in the History of Health, Science, and Medicine. 

Research

20th Century Canadian medicine Eugenics Human Experimentation Psychedelics Psychiatry and Mental Health Remembering Covid

Erika Dyck is a Professor and a Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice. Her interdisciplinary research brings social sciences and humanities perspectives to scientific and medical subjects. Her work has been published in medical, legal, economic, literary, philosophical, anthropological and historical venues. She is the author or editor of several books, including: Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Johns Hopkins, 2008; University of Manitoba Press, 2011); Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization and the Politics of Choice (University of Toronto, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award for Canadian non-fiction; Managing Madness: the Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), which won the Canadian Historical Association Prize for best book in Prairie History; with Maureen Lux, Challenging Choices: Canada’s Population control in the 1970s (McGill-Queens University Press, 2020); and Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press, 2024).  She is also the co-editor of Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (2018); and A Culture’s Catalyst: Historical Encounters with the Native American Church in Canada and Peyote (2016). Erika was the co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Health History/Revue Canadienne d’Histoire de la Santé (2015-2023) and the co-editor of two MQUP book series on history of health and the global history of alcohol and drugs. She is co-lead on the SSHRC/CIHR Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan that documents the wider impacts of Covid-19.

Education & Training

PhD (2005) McMaster University

MA (2000) University of Saskatchewan

BA (1998) Dalhousie University