Jill Bender

Education

Ph.D. History, Boston College
M.A. Culture and Colonialism, National University of Ireland, Galway
B.A. History, College of William and Mary

Courses Taught

• European Empires and Colonial Encounters
• British History, 1688 to the present
• The Modern British Empire, 1750 to the present
• Seminar in History Research and Writing: The Irish Famine
• Topics in World History: Ireland, India, and the British Empire
• War, Gender, and Crime in Victorian News
• Graduate Research Seminar: The Nineteenth-Century British Empire
• Graduate Colloquium in World History

Research

Jill Bender is a historian of the modern British Empire, particularly interested in the various connections and networks that drew together the disparate colonies of the nineteenth-century empire. Her first book, “The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire” (Cambridge University Press, 2016), traced the repercussions of the 1857 rebellion across Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony in southern Africa. Her current book project allows her to continue her interests in mid-nineteenth-century colonial connections and power relations. In this study, she examines the famine-era migration of women from Ireland’s workhouses to colonies in Australia, Canada, and southern Africa.