Alexander Peacock

Alexander Peacock is a PhD candidate specializing in English-language travelogues produced across the Georgian period, focussing on travellers' depictions of North American British settler societies. He is interested in the extent to which these works framed Anglophone North America as forming part of a wider British Atlantic world, and whether writers' thoughts and arguments about the New World drastically altered across the period of the Seven Years' War to the years after the American Revolution. His research considers themes such as empire, settler colonialism, Britishness, treatment of Indigenous peoples, British understandings of the North American environment and animals, and loyalism. 

Publications 

“‘An Indian of Considerable Consequence’: British Travellers, ‘Big Chiefs,’ and Settler Colonialism in 1790s’ Upper Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies (forthcoming). 

Peacock, Alexander and Berthelette, Scott. "Joseph Smith’s Journal of a Journey Inland from York
Factory, 1756–1757." The New American Antiquarian 2 (2023): 28-64. 

Conference Papers

“‘An Indian of Considerable Consequence’: British Travellers and ‘Big Chiefs’ in Pre-1812 Upper Canada.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Montreal, 19 June 2024.

“‘Amongst the Howlings of Wild Beasts’: Fears of the North American ‘Wilderness’ and Settler Colonial Dreams in Eighteenth-Century British Travelogues.” Paper presented at the North American Conference for British Studies, Baltimore, Maryland, 10 November 2023.

“‘Amongst the Howlings of Wild Beasts’: Wilderness Worlds and Animal Agency in Eighteenth-Century British Travelogues of North America.” Paper presented at the Northeast Conference for British Studies, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 14 October 2023.

“‘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.