The relationship between Oxford and Empire has recently been the subject of considerable attention, both within and outside the institution, and the intersecting areas of travel and translation are ones in which Oxford has played a particularly prominent role. The University of Oxford was a leading institution for the teaching of Orientalism and Oriental languages, and the training of imperial administrators. It was also instrumental in the development of anthropology as an academic discipline. This close relationship between Oxford and Empire is embodied in the many prominent translators and travellers who have studied and worked here, including William Jones, Edwin Arnold, Max Müller, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and Amitav Ghosh.
This series will bring together researchers in Oxford and elsewhere to foster interdisciplinary communication and a more consolidated examination of Oxford's imperial legacies. It will therefore include a diversity of scholars and students who are working in this area in different disciplines and fields.
Lauren Working is a postdoctoral researcher on the TIDE project (Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, 1550 -- 1700), with an interest in Tudor and Stuart sociability, empire, and material culture. Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis, explores how English colonization transformed taste and political culture in early seventeenth-century London.
David Stirrup is Professor of American Literature and Indigenous Studies at the University of Kent, where he is also and Director of the new Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies . He is the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain’.
Dexnell Peters is the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Atlantic History at Exeter College, Oxford. He is interested in the History of the Atlantic World, and, particularly, the cross-imperial relations of the British, Spanish, French and Dutch Greater Caribbean. His current research project makes a case for the rise of a Greater Southern Caribbean region (inclusive of Venezuela and the Guianas) in the late eighteenth century, showing evidence for a very polyglot, cross-imperial and interconnected world.
