Dr Tom Smith

My forthcoming book, titled Word across the Water: American Protestant Missionaries, Pacific Worlds, and the Making of Imperial Histories, examines American Protestant missionaries in Hawai‘i and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, focusing on the ideas they produced about history for U.S. audiences. Superficially, missionaries shared in the U.S. imperialist rhetoric that American empire, which arrived in both Hawai‘i and the Philippines in 1898, was fulfilling God’s sweeping historical plan for the Pacific Ocean. A closer look at missionaries’ differing and evolving ideas about history, however, reveals that their thought was not solely shaped by U.S. empire, but by their specific experiences in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. The book therefore tells a story about the diverse and uncertain foundations upon which Americans generated knowledge about the world, the making and remaking of worldviews founded upon Christian belief, and the power of colonized peoples, environments, and histories to remould totalizing American visions of oceanic space.

Building on my previous work in considering how religion structures American perceptions of the world, I am also developing a new project exploring how, from the final decades of the nineteenth century, religious networks expanded the geographical scope of transatlantic relations, creating a new centre of gravity on the United States' Pacific coast in the burgeoning city of Los Angeles.

I offer supervisions for Part IA, Outline 9 (North America, Central America, and the Caribbean since 1775) and Part IB, Topic 15 (The United States since World War I) in the History Tripos, and am one of the lecturers for Outline 9. I supervise dissertations on modern U.S. history topics both for undergraduates and MPhil candidates.

 

Previously, I have supervised and lectured for Part I, Paper 24 (The United States since 1865) of the old History Tripos, taught both supervisions and seminars for some Pacific Ocean topics on Part II, Paper 30 ('Islands and Beaches': The Pacific and Indian Oceans in the Long-Nineteenth Century), and supervised for Part I, Paper 21 (Empires in World History), as well as POL 14 (U.S. Foreign Policy) in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Within Selwyn College, I have coordinated Historical Argument and Practice teaching for undergraduate cohorts, and have run HAP seminars on religion and oceans at Faculty level.

As Selwyn College's Admissions Tutor for the arts and social sciences, I read and assess applications to Selwyn across 21 different Cambridge undergraduate courses, as well as playing a role in the college's outreach and widening participation work. I am course director for Selwyn's pre-sessional bridging course for incoming students from Widening Participation backgrounds, which will run for the first time in September 2024.

 

I have been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since January 2022. I have also been a research associate of the Cambridge Institute on Religion and International Studies. As a graduate student, I was a convener of the Cambridge World History Workshop (2017-18), as part of which role I helped organize a one-day workshop on texts in motion in May 2018, and for three years was on the editorial team for the Cambridge graduate public history blog, Doing History in Public.