University of Exeter

Teaching Fellow in Colonial/Postcolonial History, History

About

As an historian of the global missionary movement in the age of expansion my research and teaching interests are focussed mainly on imperial, religious and global history in the long nineteenth century.

Research Activity

Missionary Families: race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier (Manchester University Press, 2013):
My current research focuses on the global history of the missionary family in the nineteenth century, including its interactions with British imperialism, institutional anxieties in the metropole, and the cultural, professional and personal content of mission gender identities. In short, this work argues that paying attention to the personal, affective and familial is vital to a full and complex understanding of missionary history, as well as imperial and global history more broadly.

Spreading the Bad News: gossip, rumour and scandal in evangelical communities at home and abroad:
My future research, meanwhile, looks more towards gossip as category for analysis, and seeks to think about the ways gossip worked as a tool for demarcating and policing social, cultural and religious boundaries in the missionary world. By focussing on the mechanisms of cultural and religious control in global mission communities and the evangelical (‘missionary’) middle class in Britain, this project will examine the agency of historical figures often obscure within the archive - children, women and indigenous converts.
By borrowing a conceptual focus on gossip and reputation from early-modern historiography, it will also critically evaluate the research models of nineteenth-century history with a view to developing new methodologies sensitive to the internal mechanisms of social control in nineteenth-century communities of all classes and persuasions.

Teaching Experience

Having been a Teaching Fellow at Exeter for over a year now, I am also developing a strong teaching profile, with extensive experience of teaching on courses relating to both British and European imperialism, global religion and its interaction with colonialism, and modern global history more broadly. Above all I have a real enthusiasm for sharing knowledge, and teaching students how to think critically in academic and non-academic environments alike.

While at the University of Exeter I have taught on the following courses:
• Understanding the Modern World, c.1750 – the present (Team-taught Level One survey course – 22 weeks including 10 seminars and 44 lectures).
o Seminar Tutor
o Lecturer for the Global Histories strand (13 lectures).
• European Imperialism, 1830-1975: The French, Dutch, British and Portuguese Colonial Empires Compared (Level One Perspectives Module – 11 weeks).
• Violence and Colonial Rule in Africa and Asia, 1880-1945 (Level Two Option Module – 22 weeks).
• Doing History: Perspectives on Sources (Level Two Core Module).
• Religion, Humanitarianism and Britain’s Colonial Encounter, c. 1790-1914 (Level Three Special Subject – 22 weeks).
• Dissertation (Level Three Core Module).
• Theory and Practice of History I (Team-taught MA Core Module).
• Theory and Practice of History II (Team-taught MA Core Module).

Contact Information