Chris Petrakos, Historian, Writer, Photographer

May 2026

Christopher Petrakos is a historian and Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at the University of Toronto Mississauga whose research focuses on missionaries, Protestant theology, and empire in the late nineteenth-century Canadian and American far North. His forthcoming book, The Spiritual Borderlands at the Edge of Empire, examines William and Charlotte Bompas and their relationships with Northern Indigenous communities, the federal government, and the raucous mining population from the Alaska Purchase and Canadian Confederation (1867) to the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1900). A Chicago native who became a Canadian citizen, Petrakos has conducted extensive archival research across Canada, Great Britain, and the United States to tell a fascinating story of the North American borderlands.