Embedded Files
"I Rejoiced to Find Myself on a Kindred Shore"
"I Rejoiced to Find Myself on a Kindred Shore"
My PhD dissertation examines published British travelogues describing Anglophone North American settler societies from 1750 to 1820. My work questions the extent to which the American Revolution ended ideas that Britain and America remained culturally linked as part of a British Atlantic world. British travellers — in both the new United States and the colonies of British North America — did not expect to find a fundamentally strange place; rather, they searched for signs of home and proved highly critical of anything that failed to closely resemble Great Britain. Indeed, as many were writing with British emigrants in mind, it was important that North America did not emerge as being overly "foreign," with travellers making the assumption that Britons in the New World would want to live much as they had done at home.
Native Animals and Natural History in the British Empire
Native Animals and Natural History in the British Empire
My next project investigates the deep entanglements between native animals, natural history, and efforts to construct “Neo-Britains” in the British Empire. Although historians have long appreciated how “ecological imperialism” brought about environmental change in European settler colonies, significantly less scholarly attention has been given to how native (i.e. un-British) animals survived and potentially circumscribed colonial endeavours to recreate home overseas. In contrast, my research investigates how exotic animals influenced the development of British settler spaces, uncovering how these animals occupied a liminal space between imperial asset (e.g. for fur or science) and exotic obstacles to the project of building Neo-Britains. Above all, I wish to treat animals as independent historical agents that were a core part of the colonization process and experience. From Roanoke to Botany Bay, a study of historical human-animal interactions can help reveal the potential limits of ecological imperialism and even the durability of existing ecosystems.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse