Daniel Lange

Working title: 'Writing Pirates? – British Buccaneers and their Voyage Narratives, 1684-1699'

My thesis is a study of late 17th century piracy from a historical-anthropological perspective. Looking at British buccaneers (e.g. John Cox, Basil Ringrose, William Dampier, Lionel Wafer, Bartholomew Sharp) who wrote and published travel journals in the 1680s and 1690s, my goal is to explore how, and to what extent, their lives and texts were shaped by their piratical activities. Driven by questions of authorship and audience, I am especially interested in the practices of writing, editing and publishing that were involved in the creation of these texts. Interpreting them in the light of recent scholarship in self-narratives, one of my goals is to investigate how the authors’ modes of textual self-fashioning were influenced by the global mobility and the liminal status that encompassed their piratical past.

Growing up in Berlin, a passionate interest for the past and its traces in the present drove me to study history. As my studies progressed my research interests wandered from Ancient Rome to 19th century Europe and, finally, to the early modern period. At the same time, I gathered professional work experience in the IT sector and in public relations in urban development. In 2010, I graduated with an MA in Modern History and Economics from Free University of Berlin. Before joining the Erasmus Mundus joint doctorate TEEME (www.teemeurope.eu), I became an associated PhD student within the Dahlem Research School at FU Berlin and held a research scholarship from the German Historical Institute in London. My current research interests include social and cultural aspects of early modern seafaring as well as the history of travel, discovery and encounters. I also have broader interests in early modern British and colonial history within the Atlantic ‘world’.