headshot of a man with short hair and glasses wearing a plaid shirt in front of a blank wall
Zackery Gostisha Office: Phone: Email Interests:

Early Modern Britain and its empire; Atlantic history; State formation; Social structure; History of Race and Racism; Temporality; Infrastructure.

British History, 2023 (PhD Student)

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Early Modern Britain and its empire; Atlantic history; State formation; Social structure; History of Race and Racism; Temporality; Infrastructure.

BIOGRAPHY

 

Broadly, I am interested in modernization projects in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century British Empire. My basic intellectual project is to understand, explain, and critique the changes of this period. How did the world come to be organized around the structures that now exemplify it? What happened between roughly 1500 and 1800 to build a powerful set of enduring global systems—namely, modern states, technologies, hierarchies of identity, and ways of organizing daily life? My current projects include a study of temporality in late seventeenth-century London and a comparison of early infrastructural development in several British colonies. I also hope to work on state formation, capitalism, and social structure.

I have a background in Genocide Studies, Sociology, and History. My previous projects include a survey of colonial discourse in late eighteenth-century Pacific expeditions and a study of artificial illumination in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century London. I am an alumnus of MAPSS here at UChicago, and I received my B.A. from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. I am more than happy to speak with prospective graduate applicants or anyone with research interests that overlap with my own.