Chris M Blakley
Hello! I’m Chris. I am a historian of science with research interests in phenomenology and scientific expeditions in the context of American imperialism.
I’m an enthusiastic teacher and I’m committed to student-centered pedagogy, particularly in making higher education more accessible, affordable, and equitable. I currently teach courses in American and World History, as well as writing, rhetoric, and composition seminars in a first-year program. I’ve taught my own courses as well in Sensory History, Climate History, Environmental History, and Global History of Medicine. I have taught at a range of institutions including a private liberal arts college, a Jesuit and Marymount university, a public university, and community colleges designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution. I particularly like working with first-generation and first-year students. I also strive to be an LGBTQIA+ Ally on campus and connect students to support resources.
My current research agenda is organized around three axes: (1) the history of scientific, medical, and military networks with a focus on phenomenology and the emotions; (2) bioprospecting and the plant humanities; and (3) labor and care as analytical categories in the history of science and medicine.
I have articles forthcoming in Early American Studies and Terrae Incognitae, as well as publications in Medical History, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and International Review of Environmental History. My first book came out from Louisiana State University Press.
My research relies on archives and rare book libraries, and I am thankful for funding support from the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Oklahoma, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, American Heritage Center, Folger Shakespeare Library, and other institutions.
I’m an enthusiastic teacher and I’m committed to student-centered pedagogy, particularly in making higher education more accessible, affordable, and equitable. I currently teach courses in American and World History, as well as writing, rhetoric, and composition seminars in a first-year program. I’ve taught my own courses as well in Sensory History, Climate History, Environmental History, and Global History of Medicine. I have taught at a range of institutions including a private liberal arts college, a Jesuit and Marymount university, a public university, and community colleges designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution. I particularly like working with first-generation and first-year students. I also strive to be an LGBTQIA+ Ally on campus and connect students to support resources.
My current research agenda is organized around three axes: (1) the history of scientific, medical, and military networks with a focus on phenomenology and the emotions; (2) bioprospecting and the plant humanities; and (3) labor and care as analytical categories in the history of science and medicine.
I have articles forthcoming in Early American Studies and Terrae Incognitae, as well as publications in Medical History, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and International Review of Environmental History. My first book came out from Louisiana State University Press.
My research relies on archives and rare book libraries, and I am thankful for funding support from the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Oklahoma, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, American Heritage Center, Folger Shakespeare Library, and other institutions.
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Books by Chris M Blakley
Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Blakley describes human–animal networks spanning from Britain’s slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved. Blakley’s work reveals how African captives who became commodified through exchanges of cowry sea snails between slavers in the Bight of Benin later went on to collect zoological specimens in Barbados and Virginia for institutions such as the Royal Society. On plantations, where enslaved people labored alongside cattle, donkeys, horses, and other animals to make the agricultural fortunes of slaveholders, Blakley shows how the enslaved resisted these human–animal pairings by stealing animals for their own purposes—such as fugitives who escaped their slaveholder’s grasp by riding stolen horses. Because of experiences like these, writers and thinkers of African descent who survived slavery later attacked the institution in public as fundamentally dehumanizing, one that corrupted the humanity of both slaveholders and the enslaved.
Papers by Chris M Blakley
Book Chapters by Chris M Blakley
Book Reviews by Chris M Blakley
Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Blakley describes human–animal networks spanning from Britain’s slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved. Blakley’s work reveals how African captives who became commodified through exchanges of cowry sea snails between slavers in the Bight of Benin later went on to collect zoological specimens in Barbados and Virginia for institutions such as the Royal Society. On plantations, where enslaved people labored alongside cattle, donkeys, horses, and other animals to make the agricultural fortunes of slaveholders, Blakley shows how the enslaved resisted these human–animal pairings by stealing animals for their own purposes—such as fugitives who escaped their slaveholder’s grasp by riding stolen horses. Because of experiences like these, writers and thinkers of African descent who survived slavery later attacked the institution in public as fundamentally dehumanizing, one that corrupted the humanity of both slaveholders and the enslaved.
This paper presents the case of ship fever–– known in the present as epidemic typhus––as a disease whose colonial origins, etiology, and description by English-speaking physicians contributed to the racialization of European and African bodies in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ship fever emerged from the dungeons of Fort William in the Bengal Presidency in the mid eighteenth-century Anglophone Indo-Atlantic world. The disease came into existence in the wake of a colonial catastrophe, the Black Hole of Calcutta, in 1756 and the subsequent outcry over “despotic” Indian rulers like the Nawab of Bengal in the aftermath of that disaster. From its inception, physicians understood this illness to be part of a category of diseases endemic to risk-filled squalid environments such as jails, military barracks, and overcrowded hospitals. Historicizing ship fever as a disease associated with the health of sympathetic White soldiers and sailors, and notions that enslaved Africans were unaffected by confined spaces, filth, or unventilated air, contributes to ongoing analyses of the intersection of medicine, race, and slavery.
This paper draws upon digitized archival materials to plumb Waldo’s career for insight into the daily interactions between patients and physicians in rural New England. I examine in particular the intersection of surgical labor, forms of medical writing, sensory knowledge, and correspondence networks that deepened Waldo’s expertise over the span of his career. In addition to writing, the archive contains traces of encounters between the surgeon and his clients that reflect the embodied nature of medical work in this period.
Paper presented at the 2022 meeting of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era