Eccles Visiting Professor of North American Studies 2012
Report on Tenure as Eccles Visiting Professor of North American Studies, Spring 2012Owen Stanwood, Boston College
During the period from February 29 through May 26, 2012 I was in residence at the British Library as the Eccles Visiting Professor of North American Studies. I came to the BL to work on a project that is currently titled "Dreams of Silk and Wine: Huguenots in New Worlds, 1680-1776" (a slight change from the title on my application last year). The project concerns the role of French Protestant refugees in European imperial projects during the century after Louis XIV banned the practice of Protestantism in France in 1685. Thousands of Huguenots fled the kingdom, and many of them became active in British and Dutch imperial projects from colonial America to Ireland to the Cape of Good Hope and even the Indian Ocean. My study will be the first comprehensive global history of the Huguenot diaspora. Specifically, I am interested in the role of the state, most especially the nascent British state, in directing the movement of refugees around the empire and the world.
The BL provided the perfect place to research the British side of this global history. I wanted to see how British authorities and ordinary people dealt with the coming of the refugees. In addition, the BL houses a large number of original papers and published works created by the refugees themselves. I spent the bulk of my time in the Manuscripts Reading Room, where I consulted dozens of original manuscripts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I made a number of interesting discoveries in the BL and in general, filled in my understanding of the relationship between the refugees and the English/British state. For instance, my very first day at the BL I began examining Add. Mss. 61648, a collection of materials by or about refugees from the early-1700s. There I discovered plans for a refugee-led assault on French Newfoundland, something I had never found reference to previously. This was merely one of dozens of interesting discoveries. I also found evidence that a leading Huguenot theologian, Pierre Jurieu, operated a ring of spies that operated around France during the 1690s. Finally, there were a number of interesting documents in the papers of the duke of Newcastle (Add. Mss. 35910) describing British attempts to settle the American interior, with the help of Huguenot refugees.
While most of my research at the BL concerned Huguenots in Britain, Ireland, and the colonies, my long residence at the library allowed me to follow the refugees into unlikely places. For instance, I found substantial evidence in the India Office Records of refugees settling in some of the East India Company's outposts -- especially St. Helena, and perhaps Madras as well. This eastern migration allows me to move beyond the Atlantic and tell a global story about the movement of refugees in the eighteenth century.
Finally, I spent a fair amount of time reading rare books and printed publications that are easier to access at the BL than at my home library. The most exciting discovery was a 1698 tract, Proposals for Settling a Colony in Florida, that has somehow never been added to any of the popular databases, and only exists at the BL. The tract is one of the more interesting (and ill-fated) proposals to use Huguenots to settle British America, and one that has received very little attention from scholars.
Overall, my time at the BL was extremely interesting and productive, and I also benefited from my close proximity to other libraries and archives in London as well as the city's academic community. Indeed, I made connections during my time as the Eccles Visiting Professor that will serve me well for the rest of my career. I am grateful to the Centre for supporting my research, and hope to visit again in the future.
EU-Canada Study Tour - Sarah Hodgett
Feedback on the EU Canada study tour - September 2011I was absolutely delighted to have been offered a place on the EU Canada study tour 2011. I applied to the tour in order to enhance my postgraduate studies at Master's level at the University of Stirling. My initial motivation in the application was "To explore the possibility of examining how Multi Level Governance works in Canada, particularly in regard to the political issues of federalism, regionalism, and the role of government, as well as considering the importance of issues of cultural diversity and identity".
EU-Canada Study Tour - Helen Ayres
Presentation: January 2012Introduction:
· 32 students from 23 countries- apart from Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Luxemburg.
· We visited major private and public institutions, government bodies, think tanks and NGOs.
· After spending four days in Brussels we travelled to Ottawa, Québec, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria.
EU-Canada Study Tour and Internship Programme 2011 Thinking Canada
“Thinking Canada” 2011 – Strengthening EU-Canada LinksThe EU-Canada Study Tour and Internship Programme “Thinking Canada” offers students from European Union Member States a unique in-depth experience of Canada and of EU-Canada relations. This is achieved through an intensive four-week programme that begins in Brussels at the European Institutions and then moves to Canada, with study visits in Ottawa, Québec, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. Selected students remain in Canada to undertake internships in different institutions.
Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship in North American Studies: Report
By Dr Gillian Roberts, University of NottinghamThe Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship in North American Studies has been of enormous help to me during my current research project, Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border. Although I was fortunate to receive a year of teaching relief from my institution in 2011, this time would not have been as productive without the support of the fellowship and the access it afforded me to the British Library’s superb collection of materials relating to North American culture. My access to the British Library during this period provided me with the necessary research to complete three chapters of my monograph, my introduction, and to make important progress with my fourth chapter as well. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK providing access to such varied materials as a nineteenth-century edition of Anna Brownell Jameson’s North American travel narrative Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, Indigenous legal studies and scholarship on the impact of the Canadian Constitution on Indigenous groups, criticism on African-Canadian drama, and US-Mexico border studies. When I first devised my project, I did not quite anticipate the depth of specialised research that each of my chapters would require, and I have been incredibly fortunate that the British Library has met my research needs so thoroughly. Finally, the working space afforded by the British Library has been invaluable to my research and writing, including the rapid access to material as well as simply the quiet of the reading rooms which is so effective in facilitating scholarly endeavour. I am immensely grateful to the Eccles Centre for the Visiting Fellowship in North American Studies, and can say without hesitation that my period of the study at the British Library has been the most productive of my project as a whole.