New Research and Art from the Dunes of PEI’s North Shore: Congratulations Barbara Palmer Rousseau, MA

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Rousseau and MacFadyen at the MA Island Studies celebration, UPEI, September, 2025

The GeoREACH lab’s Graduate Research Assistant Barbara Palmer Rousseau has been busy sharing her research, and her art, from the north shore of Prince Edward Island to audiences around the world this year. Perhaps most significantly, Barbara’s Master’s thesis (MA Island Studies) was successfully defended in August, 2025. The committee consisted of Drs. Joshua MacFadyen (supervisor) and Nino Andatze (member), and the external reader was Dr. Joana Gaspar de Freitas (Center for History, School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon). Many thanks to Dr. Freitas for joining us remotely from Lisbon, Portugal, and congratulations, Barbara!

The thesis has been published on UPEI’s Island Scholar website, and the accompanying ArcGIS Story Maps are now available for public viewing. These interactive websites served both as the primary source appendices for the thesis and as public-facing historical resources for anyone interested in coastal and dune histories on PEI and across Atlantic Canada.

  • Barbara Palmer Rousseau, “Shifting Sands: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island’s Gulf Shore Dunes,” (MA Thesis, Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, 2025). https://islandscholar.ca/islandora/object/17909

Three accompanying ArcGIS Story Maps describe the changes in each of the three case studies, three contiguous coastal zones that form most of the north-east coast of Prince Edward Island:

These wonderful Story Maps are chock full of the historical maps from the PEI Public Archives and Records Office (PARO), the Island Imagined map repository, and the interactive web maps produced by the GeoREACH Lab. Thank-you to all of the students and library and archive professionals for your contributions to these map resources!

In June, her research article “Shifting Sands: Tracing the Evolution of Prince Edward Island’s Coastal Dunes” was published online in the Journal of Coastal Studies and Society: https://doi.org/10.1177/26349817251336812

Barbara has also been recognized for her art. In March, her book Finding Home at the Harbour (Island Studies Press, 2024) received the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation’s “Creative Publication of the Year Award”: https://www.peimuseum.ca/about-us/pei-museum-heritage-awards

Her book was also featured in the May/June issue of Saltscapes Magazine. See, Jodi Delong, “Dunes and foxes and history,” Saltscapes https://www.saltscapes.com/home-cottage/3765-dunes-and-foxes-and-history.html

Also this summer, Barbara’s writing and painting about “The Fury of Fiona” was included in the Rachel Carson Centre’s Virtual Exhibition “Once Upon a Dune: Coastal (Hi)Stories”: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/once-upon-dune

We are going to miss Barbara in the lab and the program this year, but you can follow her work and see even more publications and art over at her blog BPRArtPEI: https://bprartpei.wordpress.com/writing/