Research Seminar: Professor Coll Thrush

Professor Coll Thrush and Rebecca Tillett in conversation after his presentation

The American Studies Research seminar this week was delighted to welcome Professor Coll Thrush (University of British Columbia) for a talk entitled "London Entangled: Indigenous Histories at the Heart of Empire". Coll Thrush is in London on a research trip, and is in the midst of developing some very exciting work for his current book project. In the past, scholars have often treated Indigenous and urban histories as though they are mutually exclusive. But for Coll Thrush these two kinds of history are closely interrelated, or, to use his word, entangled. In a history of London framed through the experiences of Indigenous people who travelled there, from territories that became the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, he shows how stories of Inuit captives in the 1570s, Cherokee delegations in the 1760s, Hawaiian royals in the 1820s, as well as the memory of these travelers in present-day communities, all show the complex ways in which London is an important ground of Indigenous history and settler colonialism.