Joe Borsato is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University. In 2023-2024, he is a Robert L. Middlekauff Fellow at the Huntington Library, a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellow with the Renaissance Society of America, and a Sansom Ideas Foundation scholar. With previous work experience in First Nation communities, sustainability non-profits, and the heritage sector, Joe now researches the histories of Indigenous peoples, settler-Indigenous relations, Indigenous land rights, dispossession, property, the moral philosophy of early modern colonization and environmental history. His broader interests include the histories of Indigenous law, Roman law, international law, Indigenous relations with New France, early modern empires, state-formation in Tudor-Stuart England & Ireland, humanism, and the political thought of corporations. As such, he has taught a number of courses at Queen's in his capacity as a Teaching Fellow, including first-year survey courses in European & Mediterranean history and fourth-year seminar courses on Indigenous Peoples and European Empires. He is fortunate to work with Dr. Scott Berthelette and Dr. Jeffrey Collins.
Joe’s SSHRC-supported doctoral project investigates Anglo-Indigenous relations in the Atlantic world, including in Wabanakik (Acadia), K’taqamkuk (Newfoundland), Wînipâkw (the Hudson Bay watershed), Tsenacommacah (Virginia), Iouanaloa (Saint Lucia), Güiri noko (Guiana), and Mhumhain (Munster) in the early seventeenth century. Specifically, the project examines the early Wabanaki, Beothuk, Cree, Powhatan, Arawak, and Irish expressions of territorial possession against English colonization and subsequent English counter-claims. Through an investigation of archival records in the British Library, the National Archives of the UK, the Lambeth Palace Library, the Bodleian Library, la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the National Library of Ireland, the project combines the methods of Indigenous history and intellectual history to contextualize the mutual foundations of Indigenous legal claims and international law. Given the lack of research on the history of early modern Indigenous assertions of possession and the Government of Canada’s implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2021, the historical relationship between Indigenous land rights and international law is one of considerable pertinence. Through the exposition of Indigenous assertions of territorial possessions, this research seeks to foster the conditions for Indigenous freedom in the twenty-first century.
"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively." - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Book Reviews
Winchcombe, Rachel. Encountering Early America. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. In Journal of British Studies 62:2 (2023).
Pluymers, Keith. No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. In Ethnohistory 70:2 (2023).
Stern, Philip. Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2023. Forthcoming with Global Intellectual History.
