Peter Walmsley
Professor, English & Cultural Studies

My research attends to British and colonial literatures and cultures of the long eighteenth century (1660-1830) and has ranged widely over the years. While much of my early work focussed on the history and rhetoric of philosophy, with books on George Berkeley and John Locke, I've come to concentrate more on histories of science and technology in the period, with a particular interest in the representation of Indigenous craft. Most recently, I have investigated Romantic period colonial natural history, with an article recently completed on East India Company naturalist William Roxburgh, and another underway on botany and slavery in Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor. My current major SSHRC-funded research project explores ideas of plant animacy and human-plant intimacies in British Enlightenment botanical writing.