D. Grant Campbell grew up alongside four sisters and numerous cats in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. His father was a research scientist and his mother an accomplished pianist, organist and singer. From an early age, Grant displayed a talent for reading books, playing the violin, and changing his mind. He started his university studies in economics and political science before changing to English literature. After gaining his Ph.D. in English, he changed his mind again and went into librarianship and information science.

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Chronic curiosity, together with a love of travel, have led Grant to publish and present his research on a wide range of topics and in a wide range of locations. He has spoken in New Orleans on eighteenth-century economics in England; in Ottawa on the History of the Book in Canada; in Granada, Spain on international trade classification systems; in Marília, Brazil and Florence, Italy on the Semantic Web; in Krakow, Poland, on classifications of dementia behaviour in long-term care homes.

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All this diversity is anchored by a love of teaching, particularly when it comes to making complex and difficult concepts accessible to people, and encouraging students and readers to think about familiar things in new ways.

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Grant is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, where he taught for 27 years in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, after having previously taught at Queen’s University, University of Toronto, George Brown College and Dalhousie University. He currently resides in Toronto with his husband, the Reverend Daniel Benson, and their dog, Keeley.