The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute American Origins and British History Seminars will co-host a meeting with Phillip Emanuel, Barbara Thom Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, on Saturday, February 7.

Professor Emanuel is a cultural historian of empire, gender, and slavery in early modern Atlantic World. While on fellowship at the Huntington, Emanuel will be working on his manuscript, Familiarising Empire, under advance contract with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. The book focuses on the ways in which seventeenth-century imperial and trading company administrators in England, the American colonies, and on the West African coast constructed their authority during a period of rapid imperial expansion. It argues that officials must be understood as heads of what he calls 'administrative households' in which secretaries or other officeholders were assisted by a cadre of others over whom they exercised authority modelled on the domestic household but rooted in the techniques of administration, including servants of lower social standing, clients, non-European elites, members of kinship networks, women with family ties to the administration, and enslaved children. His seminar paper title is "The Phippses of Cape Coast Castle: An Afro-English Family living between Fetu and England."

Please complete the RSVP form by January 30 to receive the pre-circulated reading.

All EMSI events are free and open to the public.