Rate My Professor Kathleen Wilson

Kathleen Wilson is a Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on modern British cultural and political history, with particular emphasis on the ethnohistories and cultures of the British Empire over the long eighteenth century. She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University in 1985, M.Phil. with distinction in 1980, and M.A. in 1979 from Yale, as well as a B.A. summa cum laude from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976. Wilson began her academic career as an instructor at Yale University from 1981 to 1985 and lecturer at Harvard University from 1985 to 1987 and 1988 to 1990. She joined Stony Brook University in 1990 as Assistant Professor, advanced to Associate Professor in 1995, Professor in 2003, and now holds the SUNY Distinguished Professor title. She served as Director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University and was President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies from 2014 to 2015. She is also series editor for Cambridge University Press's Critical Perspectives on Empire.

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.