Michael Maxwell was born in the U.K. in 1933. He emigrated to Canada in 1952, where he obtained a Diploma of Agriculture from McGill University in 1954, and in 1959 received his B.A. from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) – Evening Division. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1960 and completed his Masters and Doctorate degrees in history at McGill in 1961 and 1966 respectively.

Dr. Maxwell began teaching British history at McGill in 1963, where his main focus of research was on the interaction of England, Scotland and Ireland during the early modern period. One of his books, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, won the James S. Donnelly Sr. prize, awarded by the American Conference of Irish Studies, in 1995, and this book was also short-listed in 1996 for the Harold Adams Innes prize awarded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.

Dr. Maxwell served as Chair of the Department of History at McGill from 1972 to 1975, was Dean of the Faculty of Arts between 1981 and 1986, and again for the years 1989 to 1992. Subsequently, he served as Executive Director of the McGill Centre of Medicine, Ethics and Law for one year, and, on his retirement in 2001 was appointed Professor Emeritus.