Jeremy Laity, a first-year Master of Arts student in Simon Fraser University’s Department of English, has won the 2025-2026 David and Mary Macaree Graduate Fellowship in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). Congratulations!

Laity focuses his research on British Columbia history and Indigenous literature. In 2024, he worked as a research assistant on the Unsettling Scottish Studies: Canons, Chronologies, Colonialisms conference. At the conference, he also presented a paper on the writing of Eric Duncan, a Vancouver Island settler and author whose poetry and prose explore his Scottish identity and the differences between his Shetland origins and his adopted home in the Pacific Northwest. Laity’s article on ecology and caretaking in Duncan’s writing has been accepted for the edited volume, Unsettling Scottish Studies: Canons, Chronologies, Colonialisms, currently under consideration by Edinburgh University Press.

His current research centers on the Ts’msyen missionary William Henry Pierce, the son of a Scottish father and Indigenous mother whose six-decade career on British Columbia’s northern coast was memorialized in his autobiography From Potlatch to Pulpit. Through an examination of Pierce’s various published and unpublished writings, Laity is working to uncover how Pierce understood his Scottish identity and the role that it played in his career as an Indigenous missionary. 

The David and Mary Macaree Graduate Fellowship provides financial support to graduate students who demonstrate academic and research excellence and whose research focuses on Scottish history, literature, philosophy, politics, and/or culture.

The Fellowship is valued at $20,000 (paid over three terms).