Description: Forty years prior to Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and the war of annihilation in Eastern Europe, German colonial troops committed what is arguably the first genocide of the Twentieth Century in German Southwest Africa, known today as Namibia. There, German troops murdered up to 80000 Herero and 20000 Nama as well as ensuring many more […]

Abstract: This article examines the founding myth for the community of Kingston, Ontario which holds that Associated Loyalist Michael Grass founded the city after he led eight companies of refugees from New York to Cataraqui (Kingston) in 1783-84. The legend is a “settler society fiction”, an invented founding narrative that privileges Loyalist history at the […]

Abstract: In this article we focus on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people in “Canada.” We theorize narratives that police employ to respond to this violence. Using a broad data sample of testimonies across “Canada,” this article contributes to understanding how police (in)actions make sense of, justify, and dismiss violence against Indigenous […]

Abstract: This thesis applies Edward Said’s thought to Canadian settler colonialism. I draw upon Said’s idea of contrapuntal reading to understand settler colonialism as an interdependent and coconstitutive relationship between domination and resistance. Contrapuntal refers to counterpoint in music, where two or more distinct melodic lines occur simultaneously. Each line is independent as a musical […]

Abstract: Histories of modern and Fascist Italy have usually given little space to Italian colonialism, and histories of colonialism rarely mention the Italian South. This paper considers the agrarian colonization of Libya and Sicily together, reading them as key components of Italy’s nation-building and of the Fascist population politics. After the violent reconquest of Libya […]

Excerpt: Eudora Welty’s The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, in which over half the narratives are set outside the author’s native Mississippi, confounded critics and fans when it was published in 1955. Welty’s 1951 title tale was inspired by her stay in the County Cork “Big House” (ancestral mansion) of writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973). […]

Abstract; In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Louis, was destroyed. But the desecration of the site did not end there. The multiple destructions and memorialisations that this sacred site subsequently endured reveal the markers of settler colonialism, a form of occupation that replaces Indigenous […]

Abstract: This essay investigates the encounters with Indigenous peoples on Taiwan (the island of Formosa) in the context of “imperial archipelagos.” By placing Taiwan vis-à-vis islandic territories such as Hawai‘i and the Philippines, I argue that the encounters with Formosan “aboriginals”2 could be related to the acquisition of “imperial archipelagos” against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century […]

Abstract: I leverage the case of Nuevomexicanos, New Mexico’s long-standing Mexican American population, to extend our understanding of how legacies of Spanish and American conquest—that is, double colonization—can inform Latinxs’ understandings of discrimination and race. I show that while most Nuevomexicanos reported experiences with discrimination, they often minimized their racialized experiences because such instances were […]

Abstract: This dissertation engages recent studies of empire and identity to investigate the German Empire and settler colonial identity in German Southwest Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A socio–cultural historical lens of identity provides an intimate sense of what the German Empire in German Southwest Africa meant to certain settlers who […]