Colby Gaudet

Colby Gaudet graduated from Concordia with a PhD in Religion in 2024. He is a cultural historian who studies religion, empire, and colonialism in North America/Turtle Island. Using archival and literary sources, Colby’s research questions focus on Christianity, Atlantic slavery, race, gender, kinship, education, and Indigenous-settler relations. He has a Master of Arts from the Vancouver School of Theology (2018). 

Colby’s first book, Sacramental Communities: Kinship, Society, and Politics in the Catholic Atlantic (in review, McGill-Queen’s University Press), examines ritual life and rural community-building among Acadian, Mi’kmaq, and African Nova Scotian people in the early nineteenth century. Colby has published articles on related topics in several history journals. He also has a chapter in Concordia University at 50: A Collective History (Concordia University Press, 2024). 

While studying at Concordia, Colby was the lead researcher and author of the report “Examining Concordia’s Colonial Past: An Exploration of the University’s Past and Present Relationships with Indigenous Peoples” (2023). This report investigated the history of Concordia’s founding and partner institutions vis–à-vis the Canadian residential school system. 

Presently, Colby is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Dalhousie University (2025–2027). You can learn more about Colby by visiting his website or reading his research blog: https://www.colbygaudet.com/

Publications 

• Gaudet, Colby. “Agnes, Aimée, Alice: Three Acadian Sisters as Exemplary Twentieth-Century American Catholic Women.” U.S. Catholic Historian, v. 43, no. 3 (Summer 2025): 1–31.  
• Gaudet, Colby. “‘Toutes sortes de vices’: Possession, Healing, and Religious Convergences in Early Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia.” The Canadian Historical Review, v. 105, no. 2 (June 2024): 181–205.
• Gaudet, Colby. “Questioning Devotions, Reorienting Commitments: Using Christian Religious Archives and Church History to Study Indian Residential Schools.” Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies (McGill), v. 51 (2024): 180–230.
• Gaudet, Colby. “Slavery and Black Labour in a St. Mary’s Bay Acadian Family, 1786–1840.” Acadiensis, v. 52, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 9–35.