Research Topic Title: Imperial Letters: Labour, Text and Social Experience in the Making of Colonial South Asia, 1857-1930
I am an historian of modern Britain and the British Empire. I completed my PhD in July 2023, with the support of an AHRC doctoral award, at the University of Leicester. I am currently a research fellow at the University of Bristol. My research focuses on the social, economic and cultural experiences of British, ‘Anglo-Indian’ (mixed European and Asian descent), and South Asian families in the imperial era.
My first book (being prepared) predominantly looks at the communication networks of British families who lived and worked in, but also moved between, the British metropole and South Asia in this period. I call this mode of communication, in all its myriad forms, ‘imperial letter-writing’.
I have published my research in peer-reviewed journals. My first article, ‘Widows, Violence and Death: The Construction of Imperial Identity and Memory by Women in Mourning across British India, 1857–1926’ was published in Gender & History in 2023. It examines the cultural work of women to commemorate the dead in British India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article was awarded the 2024 Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society.
My second article ‘“We Went Bravely On …”: The Theatre and Spectacle of Everyday Life in British Written Representations of Colonial South Asia’ was published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in 2023. It thinks about the ‘spectacles’ of everyday life in colonial South Asia, as constructed through text by ordinary British men and women, that reproduced difference and alterity in various ways.
Mentor:
Professor Sumita Mukherjee
Publications:
Peer-reviewed articles:
Ellen Smith, ‘Widows, Violence and Death: The Construction of Imperial Identity and Memory by Women in Mourning across British India, 1857–1926′, Gender & History, 00 (2023), pp. 1-16.
Winner of the Royal Historical Society’s 2024 Alexander Prize.
Judges’ citation here: https://royalhistsoc.org/prizes/alexander-prize/
Ellen Smith, ‘“We went bravely on…”: the theatre and spectacle of everyday life in British written representations of colonial South Asia’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 51:5 (2023), pp. 875-905.
Other Publications:
Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth (eds.), ‘Distant Communications: Beyond Death’, Cultural and Social
History, 21:3 (2024), pp. 305-318. (Special Issue).
David Bates, Alice Prochaska, Tim Hitchcock, Kate Wilcox, Ellen Smith, Rachel Bynoth, and Claire Langhamer, ‘The IHR’s Seminar Culture: Past, Present, and Future — A Roundtable Discussion’, in David Manning (ed.), Talking History: Seminar Culture at the Institute of Historical Research 1921–2021 (London: University of London Press, 2024).
Submitted:
Karin Koehler, Eleanor Hopkins, Nicola Kirkby, Kathleen McIlvenna, Harriet Thompson, and Ellen Smith (co-editors), Nineteenth-Century Communications: A Documentary History, 4 Volumes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024). Book series funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme small research grant.
Ellen Smith, ‘Empire of Small Things: Material Transactions and Knowledge Exchange in the Archives of the British Imperial Family, 1874-1892’, in Imogen Peck (editor), British Family Archives and their Afterlives, 1400-2023 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer).
Editorial Experience:
Editor-at-Large, Toynbee Prize Foundation for Global History; Editorial Board
for the Romance, Revolution and Reform Nineteenth Century Journal.
Book Reviews:
Journal of British Studies; Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.
Blogs produced for:
Social History Society; British Library’s Untold Lives series.
Contact Details:
Email: ellen.smith@bristol.ac.uk
Email: ellen_c_smith@hotmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellen-smith-1997e/
Twitter: EllenCSSmith
Website/Blog: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/ellen-smith