NACBS Dissertation Fellowship

2023

Magdalene Klassen, (Johns Hopkins University), "Friendly Warnings: Work, Sex, and Young Women Travelling through London, 1885-1925."

• Klassen’s dissertation examines young women migrating through London, and the work that they performed – including sexual labor – in the capital. By integrating her study of women’s labor with the larger cultural forces intent on reforming sex work at the time, Klassen’s project opens up vital new conversations on gender, race, and morality in Victorian Britain.

This year, the NACBS made four awards for dissertation travel grants

• Anna Roberts, (Johns Hopkins University) "Snuff and Snuffboxes in the British Isles and the British Empire, 1660-1867" 

• Courtney MacPhee, (Stanford University) "Apocalyptic Empire: Millenarian Visions for a British Empire in the Early Modern Atlantic" 

• Kristen Thomas-McGill, (University of California, Santa Barbara), "'Now I am Going to Tell You about Sir Hector Macdonald': A Cultural Biography of Memorialization and Child Sexual Abuse in the British Empire" 

• Xiaoyu Gao, (University of Chicago),

  "Empire of Copper: British Global Trade, Counterfeiting Copper Cash, and China Currency in the Long 19th Century" 

2022

Stephanie Makowski (City University of New York), “From Riot to War and Back Again: Interracial Relationships in Britain from the Interwar to the Postwar.”

• Stephanie Makowski’s dissertation project on interracial relationships in Britain from 1919 through the 1960s asks vital and pressing questions about the intersection of race with class and gender in British public life.  It offers new insights into the power of British public discourse by studying how a public preoccupation with relationships between men of color and working-class white women connected up with colonial rhetorics strengthening racist ideals both at home and abroad. Makowski’s project promises to chart not only the growth of networks promulgating racist ideals, but also the global networks combatting those racist political projects, using interracial relationships as a lens to understand the “battles over public space and British identity” in this key period.

2021

Claire Arnold (Northwestern University), “The Demands of Distance: British Families around the World, 1815- 1914.”

• Arnold's dissertation investigates middle-class migration to Argentina, China, and Australia, three regions that also attracted significant professional migration and investment over the nineteenth century. Bringing these destinations into the same frame, she argues that middle-class migrants and the family networks that backed them were a significant force not just in empire, but in the wider British world. Arnold's project raises intriguing questions about power, class, and ultimately the creation of the nuclear family.

Alison Hight (Rutgers University), "State Making and the Construction of Four Nations and Imperial Consciousness in Victorian Britain."

• Hight's dissertation explores the emergence of tensions within the "four nations" of the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century. As reformers and nationalists made the case for self-government and demanded distinctive national institutions (especially educational ones), both the four nations and colonies across the empire created began to borrow from one another's ideas and tactics. Hight also attends to the ways that celebrations of institutions that seemed to bind Britons together - including the monarchy - became ways to articulate a sense of national distinctiveness. All this ultimately laid the foundations for successful independence movements in the empire and for tensions that continue to exist at the heart of the United Kingdom today.

Claire Wrigley (University of California, Berkeley), "Family, Nation, Empire: An Imperial History of Public Housing in Britain, 1890-2017."

• Through a study of public housing that reveals it to be a crucial site in the renegotiation of citizenship, this dissertation builds on our understanding of how the making of the welfare state in Britain was entangled with the imperial project of making better British subjects. Nurturing and rewarding the "fitness" of White and non-White subjects in Britain was a key part of that project in ways that Wrigley explores in a wide-ranging set of case studies. These case studies attend to the ways that a sense of the "fitness" of subjects was bound up with evolving conceptions of not only gender, class, and race, but also the imperial politics of the family and the private sphere.

2020

Julie Johnson (University of California-Santa Barbara), “Commodifying Contraception: A Political Economy of Sex in Interwar Britain”

• Johnson’s dissertation examines the “social life” of the cervical cap in the context of the rise of eugenics, evolving conceptions of national identity, and the reformulation of ideas about the family amid the social and cultural upheavals of interwar Britain.  In so doing, it brings together the histories of production and consumption, sexual freedom and regulation, political economy and medicine, inequality and social mobility. 

2019

Louisa Foroughi (Fordham University), “What Makes a Yeoman? Status, Religion, and Material Culture in Later Medieval England.”

• Foroughi’s dissertation examines the English yeomanry from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. Yeoman, she explains, occupied a middling rank in late-medieval England, above the peasantry but beneath the gentry, and its numbers and significance rose throughout the fifteenth century. Through the examination of court records, wills and testaments, and case studies, Foroughi reveals the role of both material culture and religious belief in the making of this social group previously more familiar to early modernists. Most importantly, Foroughi has developed a series of questions – and ways to go about answering them – that recover the role of women and gender in the yeomanry’s making – something that was not high on the list of historians’ priorities in 1942, the last time the yeomanry figured as the subject of a comparable monograph. Yet the yeomanry’s position, Foroughi shows, was only made possible through the dowries brought by wives and daughters, the values transmitted from mothers to children, and the maintenance of households that partly depended upon women’s labor. To recover these aspects of late medieval and early modern social history, Foroughi’s dissertation ingeniously draws upon literary studies, religious studies, and anthropology, in order to make visible the role of women and of gender in the making of the English yeoman class.  

2018

Jessica Price (Cornell University), “Demons of Empire: Demonology and Ethnicity in English Restoration Thought” 

• Price’s dissertation will interrogate East India Company records from the late seventeenth century in a new and exciting way: to investigate how English merchants working for the Company in South Asia encountered and understood ideas of witchcraft and demonology.  When prosecuting locals for “witchcraft,” what resources and ideas did English merchants draw from and construct, and how did this in turn contribute to the generation of “demonological knowledge” during the so-called early Enlightenment?  This promises to be an important contribution to the intellectual history of English demonology from a time period and source base not usually associated with such ideas while at the same time exploring the East India Company as more than just a commercial or diplomatic entity.

2017

Ruby Daily (Northwestern University), “Sex and Violence in Modern Britain”