Robert France

Robert France is a leading environmental and landscape scholar and professor at Dalhousie University who has written on pilgrimage and sacred landscapes and had commentaries about the Great War read on CBC Radio. In June 2018, he organized a memorial service held on the Halifax waterfront on the centenary day of the departure of the hospital ship, the Llandovery Castle, which would go one to be torpedoed and result in the largest loss of lives of nurses in the Great War, and be regarded as the most serious war crime of that conflict. He is currently at work on a book derived from his walk along the Western Front.

Robert has published research on animals from bacteria to whales, in locations from the High Arctic to the tropics, much dealing with their relationships to anthropogenic stress. His humanities research concerns landscape architecture and the history of sacred landscapes, pilgrimage, and environmental history and ethnobiology.

Robert has published more than twenty books and over two hundred journal articles in four decades of research. While a faculty member at Harvard University, Dr. France's work received awards of international distinction. A native of Manitoba, he was the recipient of the province's highest honour in 1992.