Alexander Peacock is a third-year PhD student working with Dr. Jane Errington on travel literature produced by Britons who visited North America in the second half of the long eighteenth century. His work focusses on the extent to which these writers framed Anglophone North America as forming part of a wider British Atlantic world, and whether their thoughts and arguments about the New World drastically altered across the period from the Seven Years' War to the years after the American Revolution. His research considers themes such as settler colonialism, Britishness, Indigenous peoples, the North American environment, settler agriculture, and loyalism.
He also worked as a research assistant to Dr. Scott Berthelette from 2021 to 2022, looking for references in the post journals of the Hudson's Bay Company to the Métis. He also had the opportunity to work on some exploration texts from the company, in the process transcribing Joseph Smith and Joseph Waggoner's account of their 1756-1757 journey inland from York Factory into present-day Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Conference Papers
“‘An End Put to Their Race’: Travel Literature and the Promotion of Settler Colonialism in 1790s Upper Canada.” Paper presented at the Northeast Conference for British Studies, Lewiston, Maine, 22 October 2022.
“‘Great Britain will lose this bright jewel in her crown’: Travellers in Early Upper Canada and the Post-Revolutionary Uncertainties of Empire.” Paper presented at the 19th Annual McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, Montreal (online), 11 March 2022.
“Upper Canada as a Loyal Frontier: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and Representations of Space”. Presentation at the East Midlands Postgraduate History Conference: Community and Identity, Nottingham, UK, 12 July 2018.
NTU Postgraduate MA Full Fees Scholarship
