Postdoctoral Fellows, 2011-12

Ph.D. History (Stanford University, 2012). 

Dissertation: Dissecting the Holy Body: Between Medicine and Religion in Early Modern Europe

Brad is a historian of early modern Europe who focuses on religious and scientific developments. Currently he is working on turning his dissertation into a book and completing articles about the finances of the Roman Inquisition and cannibalism in early modern Italy.

Adrian Finucane
Andrew W. Mellon Posdoctoral Teaching Fellow

Office: SOS 153
Phone: (213) 740-1657
Email: afinucane@ku.edu

Ph.D. History, Harvard University (2011)

Dissertation: ““The South Sea Company and Anglo-Spanish Connections, 1713-1739” (Advisor: Joyce Chaplin)
 

Adrian is a historian of the British and Spanish empires, focusing on the social and cultural histories of the diverse peoples that interacted within the eighteenth-century Americas. More broadly, her teaching interests include contact and colonization, race and gender in early European colonies, maritime communities, and beliefs about witchcraft in early America. Her courses at USC include HIST 300 (Approaches to History) and HIST 440 (The Early Modern World).

Adrian’s current book project, The South Sea Company and Anglo-Spanish Connections, 1713-1739, focuses on the interpersonal and interimperial interactions surrounding the asiento contract of the early eighteenth century. Through this contract the British secured a monopoly on the slave trade to Spanish America. British merchants living in Spanish American cities came into sustained close contact with Spanish individuals and institutions at a time of imperial growth and in a region of much cultural and ethnic intermixing, despite longstanding conflicts between the empires. This was an area of contingency and complication in the early modern Atlantic world, one within which individuals’ seemingly established imperial, economic, and confessional loyalties were challenged, and sometimes blurred. This project centers in particular on the lives of the South Sea Company actors who lived in Spanish American cities, and on their responses to the trade and turmoil that surrounded them in a time before the boundaries in the Americas were set, and when peace between Britain and Spain seemed briefly possible. 

Lindsay O'Neill, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and Lecturer

Office: SOS 153
Phone: (213)740-8999
Email: ljoneill@usc.edu

Ph.D. History, Yale University (2008)
Dissertation: “Speaking Letters: Epistolary Networks, Communication & Community in the Wider British World, 1660-1760”  (Advisor: Keith Wrightson)

My work centers upon the way that networks formed through letter writing helped bind together an increasing vast British world during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. During this period it became both easier to send a letter, as the postal system expanded, and more necessary, as the British settled across the globe. Understanding how the British used their letters illuminates how they thought about their society and how they navigated their changing geographic and communicative worlds. Beyond letters, I am also interested in how news flowed and how the British thought about and used the information that surround them. My second project seeks to understand how the British navigated this new world of news.

Keith Woodhouse
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, American Environmental History
Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West 

Office: SOS 165
Phone: (213)740-1657
Email: kmwoodhouse@gmail.com

Keith Woodhouse studies American environmental history, focusing on the ideas and politics of environmentalism in the twentieth-century United States. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Keith's book project, A Subversive Nature: Radical Environmentalism in the Late-Twentieth-Century United States, examines the basic ethical commitments of the radical environmental movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, and where those commitments accorded with or departed from mainstream American liberal democratic ideas.