Contact 
Postal address: 7 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TB 

Email: ellen.smith@bristol.ac.uk 
Personal email: ellen_c_smith@hotmail.com  

Current Project 
I am an historian of modern Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I completed my PhD in July 2023, with the support of an AHRC doctoral award, at the University of Leicester. My research focuses on the social, economic and cultural experiences of British, ‘Anglo-Indian’ (mixed European and Asian descent), and South Asian families in the imperial era. My first book (being prepared) predominantly looks at the communication networks of British families who lived and worked in, but also moved between, the British metropole and South Asia in this period. I call this mode of communication, in all its myriad forms, ‘imperial letter-writing’.  

My book project, Imperial Letters: Labour, Text and Social Experience in the Making of Colonial South Asia, 1857-1930, is kindly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UKRI) so it naturally pays close attention to the economic and social value that correspondence yielded in the British imperial regime at this time. Several research questions occupy my time. For instance, the research asks, in what ways were ‘imperial’ letters different to British metropolitan writing and communicating? How did personal letters, as core features of imperial communication networks, undergird and shape the everyday economic and social operations of the British Empire, as well as the ideological foundations on which they rested? Does this work on communication allow for a necessary rethinking of the centrality of the family and its role in empire?  

Recent Publications 
I have published my research in various places, including several peer-reviewed journals. My first article, ‘Widows, Violence and Death: The Construction of Imperial Identity and Memory by Women in Mourning across British India, 1857–1926’ was published in Gender & History in 2023. It examines the cultural work of women to commemorate the dead in British India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article was awarded the 2024 Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society for an article based on original historical research. On similar lines, I have published an article in the Journal of British Studies on the widespread practice of publishing letters in the imperial news sphere and its reportage on the 1857 Indian Rebellion. This is: '“Pregnant with the Interests of Life and Death”: Family Correspondence and the British Imperial News Sphere during the 1857 Indian Rebellion'. Women emerge as central participants in responding to this 'imperial crisis' and also contributed to its memorialisation over time through letter-writing. 

My second published article ‘“We Went Bravely On …”: The Theatre and Spectacle of Everyday Life in British Written Representations of Colonial South Asia’ was published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in 2023. It thinks about the ‘spectacles’ of everyday life in colonial South Asia, as constructed through text by ordinary British men and women, that reproduced difference and alterity in various ways. I have also been involved in a number of collaborative research projects on the themes of ‘distant communications’ and ‘seminar culture’. I was the co-editor, along with Dr Rachel Bynoth at Bath Spa University, of a special issue in Cultural and Social History on the historical relationship between distance (temporal and geographical) and communication. I also contributed to a roundtable on the importance of ‘seminar culture’ to historical research, which was published in David Manning’s volume, Talking History in 2024. Insights for this were drawn from my long-standing role as seminar co-convenor of the Institute of Historical Research’s History Lab during my PhD, at the University of London. 

Teaching and Other Positions
Before coming to Bristol, I was a Teaching Fellow in British Social History (AFHEA status) at the University of Leicester, where I taught imperial and colonial histories and gender studies to undergraduate and masters students. I co-supervised undergraduate dissertation projects on South Asia and migration pasts as well. I also recently worked as a research associate with Dr Rehana Ahmed (Queen Mary University of London) and Professor Sumita Mukherjee (Bristol) on their AHRC project, ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1830s to the Present’. I have recently held short-term research fellowships at the University of Durham and the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami. My research has been previously funded by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the Royal Geographical Society. I was elected to the Royal Historical Society as an Associate Fellow in 2023. 

If you would like to contact me, please feel free to get in touch via my emails above.