We are excited to welcome journalist and scholar Michael Petrou to our research team!

Michael Petrou is a two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist and author who has reported from across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. His latest book, Is This Your First War? Travels Through the Post-9/11 Islamic World, won the Ottawa Book Award for non-fiction. Petrou has a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. He writes for OpenCanada.

Petrou's 2008 book, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, has been an invaluable source for the various researchers on this project. Petrou has also shared his extensive data on the Canadian volunteers, which we are using to build a database of Canadian participants in the war.