Dr Lewis Defrates
I am a cultural historian of nationalism, race and the Anglophone world in the 19th and 20th centuries. I joined the faculty as a temporary lecturer in US history in 2022, and was previously a lecturer at Maynooth University in Ireland. I completed my doctoral work at the University of Cambridge in 2021, and was funded by AHRC and the Isaac Newton Trust. My thesis, titled "Performing American Identity in Great Britain, 1880-1914" won the Sara Norton prize for best dissertation in US history. I have a master's in Modern History from Durham University, where I won the Michie Prize for best MA thesis, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Warwick, where I didn't win anything.
My current research explores the relationship between the United States and the English-speaking world through the prism of Americans overseas in the decades after the Civil War.
I am a historian of the United States and the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research explores the connection between race and nationality after the Civil War, examining how different configurations of this relationship were formulated through transnational travel and performance. I am especially interested in the role that the mechanics of cultural transmission, from steamships to telegraph cables to lithographic printing machines, played in entrenching certain ideas about Americanness both at home and abroad. I'm currently working on expanding the scope of my PhD, which focused on American performance in Britain, and turning it into a book manuscript. I'm also writing an article about citizenship, neutrality and the State Department's reaction to the presence of 'stranded' Americans in Europe and Africa at the outbreak of the First World War.
I lecture and supervise on Paper 24 (United States history 1865 to present) on part I of the history tripos.
I also supervise Part II and MPhil dissertations on topics relating to modern American history.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Key publications
Book review- ‘Louis Moore, I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood’, American Nineteenth Century History, 19 (3), 2019: 335-337.
‘Five goals, no boots’: an interrogation of the politics, play and racialized athleticism of late colonial football tours to England, 1949-1959’, Sport in History, 38 (4), 2018: 476-506.