DR TAMSON PIETSCH

Department of History,
ARC DECRA Fellow
BA Hons (Adelaide), MSt (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon)
A14 - Quadrangle
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia

(On leave until September 2012 - September 2013)

Tamson’s research interests centre on the cultural and intellectual history of Britain and its empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically her work examines the social and institutional spaces of knowledge production in this period. Her current projects focus on the global history of academic migration and the idea of ‘world education’ in the 1920s.

A graduate of the University of Adelaide, Tamson received her DPhil in 2009 from the University of Oxford where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She held the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellowship at New College, was Lecturer in Modern History at Corpus Christi College and convener of the Transnational and Global History Seminar at the University of Oxford. In 2011 she was appointed as Lecturer in Imperial and Colonial History at Brunel University in London, and between 2013 and 2016 will be on leave from this post in order to take up an ARC DECRA Fellowship at the University of Sydney.

Research areas

• British and imperial history
• Global and transnational history
• History of universities
• History of ideas
• Maritime history

Areas of teaching

Tamson has previously taught courses in nineteenth and twentieth century British, imperial and global history, transnational historiography and the history of maritime travel.

Publications

Books

• Empire of Scholars: universities, networks and the British academic world, 1880-1939, (Manchester University Press, 2013)

Journal Papers

• ‘Rethinking the British World’, Journal of British Studies, (forthcoming 2013)
  ‘Many Rhodes: Travelling scholarships and imperial citizenship in the British academic world, 1880-1940’, History of Education, 40:6 (2011): 723- 739
  ‘A British sea: making sense of global space in the late nineteenth century’, Journal of Global History, 5:3 (2010): 423-446
• ‘Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British World, 1850-1940’, Journal of Historical Geography, 36:4 (2010): 377-387

Book chapters

• ‘Out of Empire: The Universities’ Bureau and the Congresses of the Universities of the British Empire, 1913-1939’ in D. Schreuder, ed., Universities for a ‘New World’: A Commonwealth of Knowledge and Skills, 1913-2013, (Sage, 2013)
• ‘Mending a broken world: universities and the nation, 1917-1936’, in L. Beers and G. Thomas, eds., Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-building in Britain between the Wars, (Institute of Historical Research, 2012)
• ‘Between the Nation and the World: J.T. Wilson and scientific networks in the early twentieth century British World’’ in B. Bennett and J Hodge, eds., Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science in the British Empire 1850-1970, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)