Frontier Science explores the shadowy world of military research and the consequences of employing science to conquer nature in northern Canada during the Cold War.

Matthew S. Wiseman is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo

Isabel Campbell, Senior Fellow, Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, University of Toronto, and Adjunct Research Professor, Department of History, Carleton University:
“In Frontier Science, Matthew S. Wiseman brilliantly exposes the interrelationships among military research projects in northern Canada, some of which studied and marginalized Indigenous peoples in a comparative and racialized framework. Reflecting settler-colonial narratives of domination over nature and continuing a wartime mindset in the early postwar period, Canada’s Defence Research Board funded government and academic scientists and medical personnel to undertake controversial and, at times, cruel experiments.”

Matthew Farish, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto :
“With care and commitment, Matthew S. Wiseman has written an original account of military and scientific intersections in the north of Canada after the Second World War. This book does much to pull military history out of narrow enclosures and into necessary conversations with other fields, but the principal feature of Frontier Science is the skillful synthesis of difficult archival sources to tell a crucial and neglected story.”