Dr James Delbourgo
McGill University, Montreal
James Delbourgo was educated at East Anglia, Cambridge and Columbia (PhD, 2003), and teaches colonial American history and early modern science at McGill University, Montreal, where he is chair of the program in HPS. His research explores the relationship between science and colonialism in the British Atlantic world and early United States. He is the author of A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2006), winner of Harvard's Thomas J Wilson Prize for best first book, and co-editor of Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (Routledge, paperback, 2007).
While at CRASSH, Dr Delbourgo will work on his new project, which explores the histories of science, material culture and the body in relation to the nascent slave society of early colonial Jamaica, in particular through Hans Sloane's Jamaican voyage of 1687-1689 and its aftermath. The history of science, even the history of colonial science, has long ignored African slavery; the histories of slavery, capitalism and race have, meanwhile, ignored the forms of knowledge that developed in tandem with the Atlantic economy. By examining such areas as botany, curiosity-collecting, underwater exploration, and early interactions with enslaved Africans, this study aims not only to unite these two sets of concerns, but to provide a new and better account of the relationship between science, colonialism and slavery in the Atlantic world.
