Dr. Chris Bischof

I teach on the history of modern Britain in a way that emphasizes the links between British, imperial, and global history.  I do so in a survey course on "Britain and the World" as well as courses on more focused topics like "Crime and Punishment in British Cities," "Brexit: A History," "The Business of Imperialism," "A Tale of Two Cities: Glasgow and Edinburgh," and "Social Reformers in the Modern British World." 

As a researcher, my work tends to focus on the histories of education and emancipation.  My current book project, Easy Fixes: Race, Capitalism, and Social Engineering Schemes in the British West Indies, 1823-1865, explores the enthusiasm for light-handed, low-cost interventions that could supposedly make the transition from slavery to freedom both humane and profitable for everyone.  Easy Fixes examines the implications of this approach to emancipation both for freedpeople and for the way that Britons thought about race, capitalism, and imperial governance. 

I'm also in the early stages of a biography of William Campbell, a teacher in a scattered crofting community in the Scottish Highlands in the early twentieth century.  Rather than a traditional biography, the focus of this project is on the institutions and cultural currents that facilitated the dense web of connections between the local, national, imperial, and global which so profoundly shaped Campbell’s life and work.  This interest in Campbell emerged out of my first book, Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers and the State of Everyday, 1846-1906 (Oxford University Press, 2019).  Teaching Britain challenged the insularity of many histories of education by exploring elementary teachers’ work as crucial social and cultural brokers who helped to reshape the state and its relationship to society.