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Areas of interest

I research the political and social history of modern Britain, the British empire, the history of media and technology, rural economics and colonial development. My current book project traces the path that brought the cooperative movement into the centre of British colonial development and its spectacle of community-driven rural modernization during the last decades of colonial rule. From India to Malaysia, Africa and elsewhere I follow how missionaries, social science experts, and government officials “discovered” cooperatives as a technopolitics that they hoped would resolve a host of late-colonial-era crises. The system of cooperative development that they attempted to construct was supposed to support colonial ideology and stabilize the empire. However, as I explore with particular focus on Africa, such plans for cooperatives were challenged by anti-colonial movements that advanced very different visions of development for a post-colonial future.

Biography

I grew up in the Midwest of the United States and did my undergraduate degree at a small college in the Ozark mountains of the U.S. South. I received my PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2010. Before coming to SFU, I taught in New England at Bowdoin College and the University of Massachusetts.