Rate My Professor Kathleen Wilson

Wilson's scholarship addresses identity, difference, empire, gender, performance, and violence in eighteenth-century Britain and its empire. Her major monographs include The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), which received the Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society and the John Ben Snow Award from the North American Conference on British Studies; The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2003); A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (editor, Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Prominent articles feature “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon” (Past & Present, 1988; Walter D. Love Prize) and “The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound” (William and Mary Quarterly, 2009; Heizer Prize). She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2001-2002), National Endowment for the Humanities (multiple), American Council of Learned Societies, and Huntington Library (multiple), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2001. Her publications have amassed over 4,000 citations, influencing the field of imperial and cultural history.