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Alexander Peacock is a PhD candidate specializing in English-language travelogues produced across the Georgian period, focussing on travellers' depictions of North American British settler societies. His PhD dissertation examines published British travelogues describing Anglophone North American settler societies from 1750 to 1820. His thesis questions the extent to which the American Revolution ended ideas that Britain and America remained culturally linked as part of a British Atlantic world. British travellers — in both the new United States and the colonies of British North America — did not expect to find a fundamentally strange place; rather, travel writers searched for signs of home and proved highly critical of anything that failed to closely resemble Great Britain. Indeed, as many were writing with British emigrants in mind, it was important that North America did not emerge as being overly "foreign," with travellers making the assumption that Britons in the New World would want to live much as they had done at home. This research considers themes such as empire, settler colonialism, Britishness, treatment of Indigenous peoples, British understandings of the North American environment and animals, and loyalism. 

His next project, influenced by the animal turn, examines the entangled pursuits of natural history and empire. Seeking to rectify the historiographical bias in favour of imported Old World species (the literature has overwhelmingly focussed on environmental change and the destruction of existing ecosystems), this work focusses on native North American and Australian animals in British settler colonies. This research reveals that native animals, even before the development of Enlightenment science in the eighteenth century, acted as stimulants for British colonialism. At the same time, these animals were their own agents and resisted efforts to remake North America and Australia into Neo-Britains, unveiling the strangeness of these environments and frustrating settlers' desires to feel at home in the British Empire. 

Publications 

“‘An Indian of Considerable Consequence’: British Travellers, ‘Big Chiefs,’ and Settler Colonialism in 1790s’ Upper Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies 59:1 (2025): 132-166.

Peacock, Alexander and Berthelette, Scott. "Joseph Smith’s Journal of a Journey Inland from York
Factory, 1756–1757." The New American Antiquarian 2 (2023): 28-64. 

Conference Papers

“‘An Indian of Considerable Consequence’: British Travellers and ‘Big Chiefs’ in Pre-1812 Upper Canada.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Montreal, 19 June 2024.

“‘Amongst the Howlings of Wild Beasts’: Fears of the North American ‘Wilderness’ and Settler Colonial Dreams in Eighteenth-Century British Travelogues.” Paper presented at the North American Conference for British Studies, Baltimore, Maryland, 10 November 2023.

“‘Amongst the Howlings of Wild Beasts’: Wilderness Worlds and Animal Agency in Eighteenth-Century British Travelogues of North America.” Paper presented at the Northeast Conference for British Studies, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 14 October 2023.

“‘An End Put to Their Race’: Travel Literature and the Promotion of Settler Colonialism in 1790s Upper Canada.” Paper presented at the Northeast Conference for British Studies, Lewiston, Maine, 22 October 2022.

“‘Great Britain will lose this bright jewel in her crown’: Travellers in Early Upper Canada and the Post-Revolutionary Uncertainties of Empire.” Paper presented at the 19th Annual McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, Montreal (online), 11 March 2022.

“Upper Canada as a Loyal Frontier: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and Representations of Space”. Presentation at the East Midlands Postgraduate History Conference: Community and Identity, Nottingham, UK, 12 July 2018.