Faye Margaret Kert graduated from Queen’s with a BA in History in Arts. She is a former public servant who worked in communications for various departments including the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History) and the Canadian War Museum. She also spent three summers working for Parks Canada as an underwater archaeologist on a 16th –century Basque whaling ship in Red Bay, Labrador. Other archaeological work included excavating Hollandia, an 18th-century Dutch East India Company ship in the Scilly Islands (1977) and the Mary Rose, a 16th- century warship owned by Henry VIII, sunk off Portsmouth in the UK (1981).
Her Master’s work was completed at Carleton University and examined Canada’s Atlantic privateers and their little-known contribution to the War of 1812. This was followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1997