Neufeld, a third-year graduate student in the history department, works on the social, cultural, and political history of the British Empire between 1880 and 1914. His interests include the global circulation of British imperial skeptics, especially the networks they formed on the formal and informal frontiers of empire in Africa and Asia. By tracing the lives of these individuals abroad, his dissertation will examine the era of political ferment during the decades before World War I, when many Britons hoped to reform the Empire through liberal humanitarianism, the civic virtues of free trade, and a rejection of authoritarian government. His other interests include new approaches to studying the global history of the “New Imperialism,” cooperation between European empires, radical politics, and the history of psychology.
