Anna Harrington

• MA History, University of Leicester
• Legal Practice Course (LPC), University of Law
• Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL), University of Law
• BA Hons English Literature and History, University of Birmingham

I am a social and cultural historian of long eighteenth-century Britain and empire. I started my PhD in September 2021 and am funded by the Wolfson Foundation. I am broadly interested in histories of space, travel, temporality, the body, letter-writing, emotion, and identity. I also have an emerging interest in the digital humanities and am particularly interested in exploring multi-modal reconstructions of eighteenth-century embodied practices using virtual and augmented realities. I work as a Tutor for the Academic Writing Advisory Service (AWAS) and have previously taught on undergraduate modules such as “The Making of the Modern World, 1500-1800”. I studied for my undergraduate degree in English Literature and History at Birmingham from 2013-2016. During my undergraduate degree, I worked as Dr Kate Smith's research assistant as part of the College of Arts and Law's Research Scholarship programme. Upon completing my undergraduate degree, I moved into the legal profession, completing the GDL and the LPC at the University of Law whilst working at Rolls Royce. I then trained, qualified and practiced as a solicitor at a national law firm in Birmingham city centre. I returned to academia in 2020, completing my MA in History at the University of Leicester.

My thesis explores the “becoming” of the British imperial agents who sustained Britain’s imperial project on the Indian subcontinent circa 1775-1840. Informed by recent perspectives on the histories of identity, race-making, the body, space, and temporality, as well as disciplines including geography and sociology, the thesis traces the ways in which the spaces that British imperial agents engaged with between and within Britain and South Asia facilitated processes of transformation for these individuals, creating a diverse imperial experience which persistently “unsettled” their bodies, knowledge, sociabilities, identities, and practices. These encounters drew them into the imperial project in new ways, engaging and unsettling the mind and body in dialogue with “others” of empire and highlighting the inherent spatiality of the British imperial experience.

The key contribution of the thesis lies in its consideration of the experiences of imperial agents across multiple spaces, including at sea, at various “stop-off” points in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, on the Indian subcontinent, and in the spatio-temporal imaginaries produced by the letter. This approach allows the thesis to construct a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the British imperial experience in comparison to previous scholarship, much of which considers them only after their arrival in South Asia, or after their return to Britain. Expanding the geographical scope enables new considerations of the engagements British imperial agents had not only with geographical spaces beyond Britain and the three main Presidencies in India, but also with different cultures, societies, and epistemologies. These cross-cultural interactions and embodied lived experiences influenced their knowledge systems and ideologies (racial, ethnocentric) and practices (epistolary, emotional, social), complicating, and often disproving the received knowledge with which they left Britain. 

Failing to consider the full scale of spaces engaged with, and experiences gained, by these individuals has meant that we have previously had a limited sense of where and how processes of imperial identity formation took place. Imperial agents were made and remade, formed and reformed, repeatedly, across numerous, distinct, imperial spaces, which were neither singular nor coherent. Their experiences across these spaces were actively transformative and saw them as continually “becoming”, even once resident in South Asia. The thesis argues that we need to think about these individuals across all these spaces to understand the complexity of the British imperial experience in the period, and in turn, the nature and operation of the highly peopled British imperial project.

I sit on the steering boards for the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre (BECC) and the Women’s History Network (WHN). I am also Seminar Convener at the WHN. I am a Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the University of Birmingham’s Digital Early Modern Incubator.