OUR TEAM
Migration, Adaptation, Innovation:
1500-1800
Project Team
Felicia Gottmann (PI)
Felicia is associate professor of History at Northumbria University and the Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship Project ‘Migration, Adaptation, Innovation 1500-1800’. As a global and transnational historian of early modern Europe, Felicia studies the movement of goods, people, ideas, and technology to elucidate the transformational processes of early modernity: globalisation, commercialisation, technological innovation, nation-building, and the development of the political economy as a discipline. As part of the project Felicia will develop case studies on the roles of migrants and refugees in the development of European cotton and watchmaking industries. As project lead, she will also coordinate the work with the project partner organisations. Felicia is author of Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680-1760 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); editor of Commercial Cosmopolitanism? Cross-Cultural Objects, Spaces, and Institutions in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2021); and with Maxine Berg et al. also of Goods from the East, 1600-1800: trading Eurasia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She has held Fellowships at the Universities of Harvard, Warwick, Dundee, and Oxford.
contact: felicia.gottmann@northumbria.ac.uk
Floris van Swet (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Floris is a historian of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868). As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the UKRI-funded ‘Migration, Adaptation, Innovation: 1500-1800’ project at Northumbria University, Floris is focusing on migrants and skills-transfer in East Asia. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2019. His thesis, entitled Finding a Place: Rōnin Identity in the Tokugawa Period, focused on the interaction between institutional, everyday understandings of status, and the subjective, mutable nature of the social label of ‘rōnin’ (masterless samurai). From 2019 until 2021 he worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Digital Tokugawa Lab at Yale University creating a digital map of the shifting political realities of Tokugawa Japan. His broader research interests lie in social change, rural development and labour migration.
contact: floris.swet@northumbria.ac.uk
Rémi Dewière (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Rémi is a historian interested in Islamic West Africa in the Early Modern period. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the project, he is focusing on migrants and skill-transfer in the Islamic World, from Timbuktu to Java, from the 16th century to the 1850s. Rémi received his PhD in African History (2015) from Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University (IMAf) and won a prize for his PhD thesis (2016) from the Institut sur l’Islam et les Sociétés du Monde Musulman (EHESS). From 2012 to 2021, he was Research Assistant in the ERC Project ConfigMed and postodoctoral fellow in the EHESS (Centre Alexandre-Koyré), Max Weber Fellow in the European University Institute, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND fellow at the University of Warwick. His book, Du lac Tchad à La Mecque. Le sultanat du Borno et son monde (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), provides a new perspective on the functioning of this Islamic Sahelian state in the Early Modern period and its relationship with the world around it through the trans-Saharan routes.
contact: remi.dewiere@northumbria.ac.uk
Oliver Gunning (Project PhD student)
Oliver will be working on his own PhD thesis focussing on a British Case study. As part of the overall project, he will be investigating the role of skilled migrants in the development of British glass-making industries. He aims to provide a regional view, looking beyond current London-centred analyses, to understand the transfer of knowledge and techniques. After graduating from the University of Glasgow in 2018, Oliver worked in the commercial department of English Heritage as a regional Event Manager, before completing his Masters at Newcastle and then starting his PhD at Northumbria in October 2021. His broader research interests are focused on conceptions of British cultural identity, the French Revolution and its socio-cultural impacts, and the philosophy and psychology of education and understanding.
contact: oliver.gunning@northumbria.ac.uk
June Watson (Associated PhD student)
June Watson is working on her own PhD thesis provisionally entitled: “A Study of Scientific Female Networks, Women’s Agency and their Contributions to Modern Science in the Long Eighteenth Century”. As part of the overall project, she will be investigating the global trading activities of the Tankerville, Cavendish, Spencer, and Colebrooke families and links with the East India Company to underscore the interconnectedness of empire and female social networks. After completing her undergraduate degree at Sunderland University, June worked on botanizing practices of elite women in the eighteenth century before joining Northumbria for her masters and then PhD. Her broader research interests lie in the cultural history of elite women’s contributions to the diffusion of science and knowledge. Her thesis will offer the first study of female scientific networks encompassing the history of science, cultural history, the notion of contact zones and gender history. In collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden, KEW June has presented an exhibition of a selection of hitherto unknown botanical illustrations of Lady Emma Tankerville (1752-1836) painted on the island of Madeira 1811-1812. The exhibition is currently touring galleries in Northumberland, moving to Surrey in the summer of 2022. She is the author of a booklet to accompany the exhibition Lady Emma Tankerville: A Pioneering Botanist (Wildgoose Press, 2021).
contact: June.watson@northumbria.ac.uk
Advisory Board
Julia Adams
Professor of Sociology and International and Area Studies,
Chair Heads of College Council and Co-Director CHESS, Yale University
Mareile Flitsch
Chair of Social Anthropology, Museology and Chinese Anthropology, University of Zurich and Director of the Ethnographic Museum, University of Zurich
Dagmar Schäfer
Director, Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Giorgio Riello
Chair of Early Modern Global History, European University Institute, Florence
Simon Schaffer
FBA, Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge
