Dr. Chelsea G. Davis

Details

Education

• PhD, History, 2021, The George Washington University
• MA, Global, Imperial and Postcolonial History, 2015, Queen Mary University of London
• BA, History and English Professional Writing, 2014, University of Delaware

Teaching

• HST 360: Britain and the World, 55 BC-1688
• HST 361: Britain and the World, 1707-Present
• HST 346: Drunk History: A Global History of Alcohol
• HST 390: Historiography and Historical Methods
• HST 567-667: Race and Gender in the British Empire
• HST 701: Historiography and Historical Methods

Professional experience

Selected publications

“All that Glitters is Wine? Viticultural Capitalists and the Creation of Britain’s Colonial Wine Industry,” in Special Issue: “Settler Vines: Making and Consuming Wine in a Globalizing World since 1850,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (2023).

“The Contradictions of ‘Civilizing’ Consumption: Colonial Wine and Race in Britain’s 19th Century Imperial Project,” Special Issue: Food and Empire, Global Food History (2023).

“Fruits of their Labour: Networks of Migration, Knowledge, and Work in the 19th Century Cape Wine Industry,” in eds. Stéphanie Lachaud-Martin, Corinne Marache, Julie McIntyre, Mikaël Pierre, Wine Worlds, Networks, and Scales: Intermediations in the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wine (Peter Lang: Business and Innovation Series, 2021).

“From European Roots to Australian Wine: Exchanges in Agricultural Knowledge in the 19th Century Australian Wine Industry,” in eds. Joe Regan and Cathal Smith, Agrarian Reform and Resistance in an Age of Globalisation: The Euro-American World and Beyond, 1780-1914 (London: Routledge, 2019).

Research and professional interests

Dr. Davis is a historian of modern British Empire with regional focus in sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. Her work is primarily tied to the history of commodities, globalization, labor, and the environment in the nineteenth century. Her research to date studies Britain’s colonial wine industry in South Africa and Australia. Davis is currently writing her first book, "The Empire and the Aphid: Phylloxera, Science, and Race in Britain’s Wine Industries, 1860-1910," which studies the environmental crisis of phylloxera and its impact on the mobility of scientific knowledge and ideas shared across Africa, Australia, Europe, and the United States.