Modern Britain and empire; colonial India; women, race, gender and feminism; archives and embodied experience; postcolonial studies; world history; the biocultural and animal histories; and anti-imperial critique and method.

I’m a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, with a specialty in colonial India and an ongoing interest in Australasia and Africa. I’ve written on topics ranging from feminism and colonialism to the relationship of empire to the nation and the world. Women, gender and sexuality have always been central to my research, which has drawn on intersectional methods to privilege race as a modality through which systems and identities operate. I've been especially concerned with the role of Indian women in India, in Britain and in the wider diaspora. I’ve edited collections about politics, mobility, postcolonialism, animals and world histories from below, and have frequently collaborated with Tony Ballantyne. In collaboration with Renisa Mawani I have developed some expertise in imagining what more-than-human histories might look like.

At Illinois I have taught courses on modern British history and imperialism, gender and colonialism, autobiography and the archive, approaches and methods, and world history. I am currently working on several collaborations, which take the form of edited collections on subjects ranging from critical fabulations to history and poetry.  I am the editor of a Duke University Press series on history teaching. And my most recent monograph, Gender History: A Very Short Introduction, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. A collection co-edited with Mawani and Samantha Frost called Biocultural Empire is due out from Bloomsbury UK in 2025.

In addition to my work as a historian, I am the director of the campus humanities center, The Humanities Research Institute. For more information click here. I am also the Principal Investigator for Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants which support The Odyssey Project and the 16-partner consortium, Humanities Without Walls. This work, together with a fellowship at the OpEd Project, has led me to think and write about both the value of humanistic perspectives in the public sphere and about the humanities as a social practice.

In 2023 I was appointed to the Board of Illinois Humanities. I also serve as the chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Illinois Press.

For cv, click here.

B.A. Yale University, 1983
M.A. University of Chicago, 1984
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1990

Swanlund Endowed Professor, University of Illinois, 2018-
Center for Advanced Study Professor, 2018-
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, 2010-11
Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities Fellowship, UIUC, 2011-12
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2015 (declined)
Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, 2004-18
University Scholar, University of Illinois, 2001-2004
William Evans Residential Fellowship, University of Otago (Dunedin, NZ), 2004
American Philosophical Society Research Fellowship, 1995
NEH summer seminar, “The Culture of London, 1850-1925,” Institute of Historical Research, London, 1995
American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, 1993
Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, 1987-88

Principal Investigator

* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities without Walls ($12.2million)

* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emerging Areas in the Humanities ($2m)

* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Publishing without Walls (co-PI; $1m)

* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Odyssey Project ($650,000)

 * Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Interseminars” (planning grant, $150,000)

* Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Interseminars” ($2m)

 * ACLS/DRIVE Postdoc-to-Faculty/Early Career URM scholars ($170k)

 * Presidential Initiative for Celebrating the Arts and Humanities ($150,000)

  *  UIUC Inv. for Growth, Training in Digital Methods for Humanists (c.  $660k)

(217) 333-6874

World Histories from Below

An ABC of Queen Victoria's Empire

How Empire Shaped Us

Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons

The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism

An Illinois Sampler: Teaching and Research on the Prairie

Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation

Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism

Empires and the Reach of the Global

Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles

The First Anglo-Afghan Wars: A Reader

The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau

Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India

At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain

Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire

Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915

Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History

Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History

After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation

Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader

Postcolonial Studies and Beyond