Professor Stephen Tuffnell

I arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate from East Yorkshire in 2005 and was excited by the huge variety among Oxford historians and was especially drawn towards the history of the United States by inspirational teachers. My research focuses on the United States’ global connections in the nineteenth century, which allows me to continue exploring the histories of nations and empires around the globe and the development of the modern world.

Teaching

At St Peter’s, I teach United States history from 1776 to the present day. I run the first-year paper “Imperial Republic: The United States and Global Imperialism, c.1867-1914” which examines the breadth and diversity of the United States imperial project in the Pacific and Caribbean and the ways in which it was shaped by the colonised. I have supervised doctoral students on the transnational and imperial histories of American finance, the U.S. home missions movement, the peace movement, and Pacific Suffrage.

Research

I am gripped by the history of the United States’ relationship to the world. I am interested in American emigration, the history of commodities such as gold and ice, and in rethinking the geography of American Empire in the late-nineteenth century.

I am currently writing Imperial Odyssey: The USS Ticonderoga and the Search for U.S. Empire. The book takes readers off the traditional imperial map of the United States via the globe-spanning cruise of the USS Ticonderoga between 1879 and 1881. From unfamiliar vantages in Atlantic Africa, the Western Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East Asia the book examines the immense imperial archive created by the cruise, exposing the tenacious workings of empire and the insatiable appetite for new knowledge of the world that drove the endeavour of creating a global steam empire.

My first book, Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America tells the untold story of American migration to Britain in the nineteenth century. From Liverpool and London, American emigrants produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to US nation-building. The volume demonstrates that the United States’ struggle toward independent nationhood was entangled at every step with the world’s most powerful empire.

Selected publications

Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2020)

A Global History of Gold Rushes, ed. B. Mountford and S. Tuffnell (University of California Press, 2018)