Margaret O'Riordan Ross

Maggie O’Riordan Ross is a 2025-2027 SSHRC postdoctoral fellow whose research examines the legal, political, and social history of sex work and vice in Ontario. She received her PhD in History from Queen’s University in 2025. Maggie's article, “Your Town is Rotten”: Prostitution, Profit, and the Governing of Vice in Kingston, Ontario, 1860s-1920s, published by the Journal of the History of Sexuality, was awarded the Best Article Prize from the Canadian Historical Association’s Committee on the History of Sexuality in 2024. She was the W. C. Good Memorial Fellow from 2022-2024, and the R. Roy McMurtry Fellow in Legal History from 2024-2024. Her postdoctoral project, “Apprehending Vice: Sexuality, Evidence, and the Law in Ontario, 1950-1972,” explores the epistemological underpinnings of vice that led to its designation as a social “problem” in postwar Ontario and the on-the-ground techniques by which legal authorities regulated what they came to define as vice.