The Traffic in Women: Gender, Mobility, and Migration Control in the Twentieth Century World

This project will develop a transnational history of ‘sex trafficking’ in the early twentieth century. I will look at the discourses surrounding sex trafficking and examine how they helped to generate national and international frameworks for the control and surveillance of women’s migration. More significantly, I will explore how migrant women themselves experienced their marginalized and illicit migration, and how they navigated surveillance and migration restriction. This project will take as its intellectual starting point the idea that sex trafficking cannot be studied as a phenomenon separate from women’s migrant labour more generally, and that sex trafficking, as part of the story of globalization, has a very significant history before 1945.

The Middle of Nowhere: Critical Family History, Settler Colonialism, and the Inheritance of Place

I want to understand what it means to have family roots in a place that was charted by imperialism, built by settler-colonialism, and marked by exploitation. Using the emerging framework of ‘critical family history’, combined with the interdisciplinary methodologies of co-production, storytelling, and archival research, this project aims to disrupt the nostalgic registers of settler-colonial belonging, and produce new and useable histories for the present. Family history and genealogy has been said to have ‘twisted roots’ in white supremacism and imperialism, but it is also the most common way people engage with and make their own histories. This award will support my research into my own family’s place in settler-colonial history and enable me to write an entangled history of individual ancestors that illuminates the wider history of the North Atlantic colonial world. The project also aims to empower family historians to tell ‘new stories’ about their families that challenge top-down narratives of imperial and racial belonging; and to develop new ways of understanding our twisted roots and troubled inheritances.

Decolonisation Lecture Series

With Martin Thomas & Adam Hanieh

This lecture series explores aspects of the global processes of decolonisation, from the earliest European colonial expansions to the political and economic upheavals of the 20th century. We will examine the colonisation of Newfoundland, plus the economic consequences of decolonisation in the 20th century, considering how former colonies navigated independence, economic restructuring, and global trade.