Jack Englehardt is a full-time PhD candidate in the Department of International History. Jack holds a BA in International Relations and Modern History from the University of St Andrews, as well as a MSc in Empires, Colonialism, and Globalisation from LSE, and a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) from the University of Sussex.
He is a qualified secondary schoolteacher who has taught both history and geography in London-area state schools.He continues to work with educational nonprofits to empower young students through beyond-the-curriculum learning, including as an EPQ mentor and tutor with LSE Springboard.
Jack’s doctoral work is supported at LSE by a PhD Studentship.
Research Topic:
Jack’s research at LSE is concerned with the representation of tropical spaces in British popular culture during the early-to-mid 19th century, a period intimately associated with the rise of ‘high empire’. He is interested in how tropical motifs (including warmth, vegetation, animal life, disease, and cultural difference) entered common currency through print media, and how these motifs coalesced into a template on which to project imperial fantasies about commercial and civilisational progress. He is particularly interested in popular media, such as schoolbook geography readers, street literature, and illustrated magazines, which would have been accessible to a broad set of the imperial public.
The significance of this topic lies in its ability to demonstrate how early modern print cultures had the capacity to assemble impressions of environmental difference into an interconnected architecture of place. In this way, his research underscores that imagined geographies were not merely decorative, but foundational to the development of the imperial psyche, shaping and justifying colonial ambitions by rendering nature accessible to metropolitan audiences.
Project Title: Reading the Equator: Cultural Mappings of the Tropics as a Prelude to Empire, 1815-1860.
Supervisor: Dr Paul Stock