H. David Kirk, Ph.D.

H. David Kirk is a Canadian sociologist (as well as an adoptive parent) considered by most to be the “grandfather” of modern adoption. He studied at Cornell and taught at McChill and University of Waterloo. The author of the highly influential Shared Fate: A Theory and Method of Adoptive Relations and Adoptive Kinship–An Institution in Need of Reform, his “retirement speech” given at the AFA conference in Dallas in 1995, is reprinted by Perspectives Press in the booklet Looking Back, Looking Forward: An Adoptive Father’s Sociological Testmament. In retirement in British Columbia, he continues to author an internet column “Shared Fate and More.”

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