On Monday, Oct. 31 at 3:15 p.m. via Zoom, Dr. Chelsea Davis (Missouri State University) will give a talk entitled, “The Contradictions of ‘Civilizing’ Consumption: Colonial Wine in Britain’s Imperial Project.”
Davis is an Assistant Professor of British History with a focus on Empire at Missouri State University. She received her Ph.D. from The George Washington University in 2021, where her doctoral dissertation, “Cultivating Imperial Networks: British Colonial Wine Production at the Cape of Good Hope and South Australia, 1834–1910,” examined the process of founding and integrating Britain’s colonial wine industries in Australia and South Africa into the global market. The archival research that grounds her work spanning four continents was generously supported by the American Historical Association, the COSMOS Club, both the History Department and Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, and the College of Humanities and Public Affairs at Missouri State University. Prior to joining Missouri State’s History Department, Davis was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Colby College. She is currently developing her monograph entitled, The Empire and the Aphid: Phylloxera, Science, and Race in the Age of Migration, 1860–1910, which uses the grape vine disease phylloxera as an entry point to study global migrations of insect ‘invaders’, colonial producers, scientists, laborers, and viticultural knowledge.
Please register for the talk here
