Ed Stoddard

Ed Stoddard's Alumni Profile

My studies at Dal—both what I studied and the standards that were expected of me—have enabled me to grasp aspects of currency markets as well as capture the drama of a lion darting.

Ed Stoddard attended Dalhousie after graduating from Prince Andrew High in Dartmouth. He received his Honours B.A. in History in 1988, and, in 1991 he was awarded a Masters degree following completion of his thesis on the history of Canadian women murderesses. Ed later taught English in Eastern Europe where he began working as a journalist for Reuters in 1995. As a correspondent based in Lithuania, Ed reported on many of the profound changes that swept over the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in the post-Gorbachov era. Currently based in South Africa, Ed returned to the Halifax area for a brief family holiday visit December 2002 and spent an afternoon on campus chatting with old friends, getting his picture taken and reflecting on how his education prepared him for the exciting profession he now practices.

“My years of studying liberal arts at Dalhousie,” Ed recalled, “were among the most rewarding and stimulating of my life.”

Training in economics, political science, and history gave him “the diverse tools I need for my job. I have covered lion captures, volcano eruptions in the Congo and cage dives with Great White sharks, as well as elections, bond markets and the sagging fortunes of South Africa’s currency, the rand. My studies at Dal — both what I studied and the standards that were expected of me — have enabled me to grasp some of the aspects of currency markets as well as capture the drama of a lion darting.”

Liberal arts at Dalhousie, he added, “gave me an appreciation of other cultures and countries, and an insight into the far-flung places I have found myself” living in and reporting on. “Studying black-white relations in the post Civil War American South was academic to me at one time,” he continued, “but the books I read then have fresh significance to me in post-apartheid South Africa. The past, indeed, is a different country!”

Now back in South Africa, Ed is an avid hunter and fisherman, activities he first mastered growing up in Nova Scotia. His job demands that he make sense of rapidly moving events and longer-term trends and that he write about them effectively and objectively. The roots of his professional life extend back to classrooms at Dalhousie where his intellectual world expanded, his imagination was awakened, and his writing and analytical skills were honed. Ed Stoddard is a proud Dal alumnus!