W. Peter Ward was born in Edmonton in 1943. He obtained a BA in English Literature from the University of Alberta in 1964 and an MA in History from the same university in 1966. He was awarded a Ph.D. in History from Queen's University in Kingston in 1973. He taught high school for the Edmonton Public School Board in 1968-69. He held part-time or sessional teaching appointments at the University of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Queen's University between 1967 and 1973.
Ward's research interests include the history of the family in Canada, the history of immigration in Canada, the history of population health and the history of human physical growth. His notable books are White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia (1978, 1990, 2002), Courtship, Love and Marriage in 19th Century English Canada (1990), Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West (1993), and A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (1999). He has published articles in leading national and international journals, including the Canadian Historical Review, the American Historical Review, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and Economics and Human Biology.
Peter Ward joined the UBC Department of History in 1973 as an Assistant Professor. He was granted tenure in 1978, promoted to Associate Professor in 1979, and was granted full academic status in 1990. He served as Head of the UBC History Department (1991-1996) and later as Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the Faculty of Arts (2002-2005). In addition, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Augsburg in 1995 and the University of Bologna in 2009-10 and 2011-12.
In 2005 Ward joined the UBC Library as Deputy University Librarian. He served as University Librarian pro tem from 2007-2009. During this period, he helped oversee the completion of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Additionally, he launched a planning process that led to establishing UBC's institutional repository, cIRcle.
Ward has been the recipient of numerous research grants from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine and UBC. He has also received several distinctions for scholarship in his career, including leave fellowships from the Canada Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. In 1990 the Social Science Federation of Canada cited his book White Canada Forever as one of the 20 most essential books in English supported by the Council over the previous 50 years. He also received a UBC Killam Fellowship in 1990-91 and a UBC Killam Research Prize in 1998. In 2012 he was ranked 2nd among Canada's historians in the first HiBAR survey (Hirsch-Index Benchmarking of Academic Research) that identified the most influential scholarly researchers in their respective fields.