Dr Oli Charbonneau
- Lecturer in American History (History)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441Biography
I am a historian of the United States empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work explores cultures of American colonialism in Southeast Asia and North America, attending to militarized violence, labor, and imperial knowledge production, among other topics.
My first book, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World, was a transimperial history of U.S. rule in the Muslim-majority Southern Philippines (1899-1940s). It argued for a global reading of this peripheralized space and explored a range of topics: the racialization of indigenous groups in a colonial society; the transpacific mobilities of Moro individuals and groups; the role of fear, carcerality, and violence in the daily life of the colony; and the pervasive supraregional exchanges that patterned U.S. imperial governance. It was published by Cornell University Press in 2020. A Philippine edition was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2021. The latter was a finalist for a Philippine National Book Award and a Gintong Aklat Award. The project produced articles in Diplomatic History, Modern American History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as a chapter in the edited volume Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain. For this body of work, I was awarded the 2022 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The resulting keynote lecture, focusing on industrial schooling in America’s empire, was published by Diplomatic History in 2023.
I am presently engaged in two new projects. The first is a co-edited volume (with Karine Walther) titled The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies. Funded by the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, this interdisciplinary collection argues that labor education schemes have embedded inequality and constituted capitalist modernity in a host of colonial and postcolonial societies. It will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. My second monograph, tentatively titled Mohonk: The Progressive Origins of American Empire, is a global microhistory that uses a luxury hotel in Upstate New York to understand U.S. imperial ascendancy. It argues that conferencing at the Mohonk Mountain House helped forge an American pedagogical empire – the moralizing vision of U.S.-led global order that defined the twentieth century – by sanitizing and producing colonial projects. I have conducted research for this project in the UK, the Philippines, and the United States, including as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College in 2023.
Before arriving in Glasgow in 2019, I taught at several Canadian schools including Huron University College, King’s University College, and Brock University. I completed my PhD in 2016 at the University of Western Ontario. I live with my partner, our kid, and a weird old pug in Glasgow. I am a Scorpio and my best bowling score is 193.
Supervision
I welcome students with research projects on global and imperial dimensions of U.S. history. I am most comfortable supervising topics that fall within my period of study (1860s-1930s) but am happy to make exceptions where merited.
- Banks, Susie
Millennial Mythologies: American Memory, Imagination, and Cr
