Darren Reid

Darren's research approaches the Aborigines' Protection Society's correspondence network as a microcosm of nineteenth-century British imperial thought, identity, and performance. Rather than evaluate the APS from the perspectives of its members in the imperial metropole, it evaluates the APS from the perspectives of the global network of settler, missionary, traveller, and Indigenous correspondents that provided the APS with information on the conditions of the imperial peripheries.
 
Who were these people? Why did they feel the need to write to the APS, and what did they think this would accomplish? How did they have to imagine themselves, the empire, and the APS in order to write in the way they did? What kind of knowledge were they producing, and what did the APS do with their knowledge upon receiving it? How do these letters fit into historiographies of imperial networks, criticism, resistance, settler colonialism, etc?
 
In asking these questions, Darren's research pulls at several different threads constituting modern imperial historiography. It questions the extent to which Indigenous voices and ideas were present in the nineteenth-century imperial episteme. It questions the extent to which settlers, missionaries, travellers, and Indigenous individuals perceived themselves, not only as imperial agents or subjects, but also as active participants in imperial politics. It questions the extent to which the APS acted as a network connecting individuals across the empire and thereby enabling a transimperial epistolary mobility. And it ponders the many meanings of humanitarianism and question the extent to which it played a part in the performance of empire.

PhD

Supervisor: Margot Finn 
Working title: Imperial Informants in a Settler World: Writing Empire to the British Aborigines' Protection Society from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, 1870-1890

Expected completion date: 2024

Select Publications

• “‘Compound dispossession’ in southern Ontario: converging trajectories of colonial dispossession and inter-Indigenous conflict, 1886-1900.” Journal of Canadian Studies (2022). https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs-2022-0022. 
• "The Aborigines' Protection Society as an Anticolonial Network: Rethinking the APS "from the bottom up" through letters written by Black South Africans, 1883–87." Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 22, no. 2 (2021) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/801557. 
• "Shadrach Boyce Mama and the 'Kaffir Depot': navigating imperial networks to agitate against the forced removal of Xhosa women and children from Cape Town, May-December 1879." South African Historical Journal (2020): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2020.1827018. 
• "Dispossession and Legal Mentalité in Nineteenth Century South Africa: Grotian and Lockean Theories of Property Acquisition in the Annexations of British Kaffraria and Natalia." Settler Colonial Studies (2020): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2020.1829423. 
• "Distant Reading, 'The Great Unread,' and Nineteenth Century British Conceptualizations of the Civilizing Mission: A Case Study." Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 8, no. 15 (2019). http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/jihi/article/view/3201.
• "Culture as Imperial Synapse: Pre- and Post-Foucauldian Approaches to Culture in British Imperial Historiography." Le foucaldien 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–26. https://foucaldien.net/articles/10.16995/lefou.59.

Funding 

• UCL Graduate Research Scholarship
• UCL Overseas Research Scholarship
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship

Projects 

Darren is a research assistant on two SSHRC and CIHR funded projects: 

• Four Stories About Food Sovereignty: Transnational Crises and Local Action, https://www.fourstoriesaboutfood.org/
• Inoculating Against an Infodemic: Microlearning Interventions to Address CoV Misinformation, https://lidoncovid19.ca/

Conferences 

• “Video games as public history: using game design to disseminate historical research to diverse audiences.” IHR Digital History Seminar, London, U.K. 6 December 2022. https://youtu.be/jkQqDcneiuw. 
• “Manufactured complicity: missionary society concessions to settler society in the late nineteenth century.” Britain and the World conference, Plymouth, U.K. 15 June 2022.
• “Participatory journalism in the imperial press system: subverting local discourses through letters to the editor in the late nineteenth century.” Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, virtual conference. 17 May 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKl-v3NJc-g. 
• “Can the Subaltern Write? Navigating mediated voices in South African correspondence with the Aborigines' Protection Society in the late nineteenth century.” Distant Communications, virtual conference. 22 July 2021. https://youtu.be/9KYJxD0-uV8. 
• “The Aborigines' Protection Society "from the bottom-up": epistolary performances of imperial citizenship(s) in the late nineteenth century.” Britain and the World, virtual conference. 16 June 2021. https://youtu.be/Brzmo-dOtjo. 

Book Reviews

• “Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies. Richard Price. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2021.” H-Net Reviews (2022). https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57125.
•  “Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870. Zoë Laidlaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 374 pp. £90 (hardcover).” Britain and the World 15, no. 1 (2022): 91-94. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/brw.2022.0385.  
• “Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada. Cecilia Morgan. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. xvii+326pp. $39.95 (cloth).” Britain and the World 13, no. 2 (2020): 191-193. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/brw.2020.0353. 

Teaching Assistantships

•    UCL Writing Lab
•    History 212 – The Global Economy since 1700

Public Engagement

• Public history video game: Ab Uno Sanguine, https://darrenreid.itch.io/ab-uno-sanguine