Rhonda Semple

520
Nicholson Tower
(902) 867-3948
Degree: 
Ph.D. King's College London
Phone: 
(902) 867-3948
Office: 
520 Nicholson Tower

Sabbatical - Winter 2022

Title: 
Associate Professor

 

 

Courses

Global History Since 1300
The British Empire
Britain in the 20th Century
Victorian Britain
Seminar in Modern European History
British History since 1707
European Women’s History
Introduction to South Asian History

Research Interests

My research interest is the social and cultural history of the modern British empire. I join contemporaries who focus the lens of the ‘new’ imperial scholarship on the work of liberal Protestant missions, primarily in north India. My current work focuses on the institutional and religious/cultural legacy of mission work in north-central Indian communities, in particular mission work with leper patients in the late 19 and early 20C. This study is allowing me to examine the interface between mission work and the work of international secular NGOs, and the impact of non-western attitudes and pharmacological knowledge on western scientific practice.

Publications & Conferences

Articles/Book Chapters (since 2009)

[Forthcoming] “Spiritual Imperative, Clinical Intervention, and Community Wellbeing: local/global in early 20C leprosy interventions, in Kumaon, north India.” Transnationalism in Missions.  Spec. issue of Social Sciences and Missions (Fall 2016).
 
[Forthcoming] “Unsettled Childhoods: Making Missions through (Re)making Children.” In Creating Religious Childhoods: Children, Young People and Christianity in the Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950, eds. Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin.  Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2015.
 
"Missionary Masculinity: Kumani Christians negotiating western notions of professionalism, masculinity and belief in 19C British protestant mainstream missions” Religious Studies and Theology, Special Issue:Religion and Masculinity, Vol 33, No 2 (2014):  225-242.
 
“Christian Model, Mission Realities: The business of regularizing family in mission communities in late nineteenth-century north India,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol 14, No 1 (Spring 2013).  Project MUSE. Web. 23 Sep. 2015. <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.
 
“Connecting Disconnections: Troubling meanings of Christian conversion in Imperial north India.” In Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity, eds. Richard Fox Young and Jonathan Andrew Seitz.  Boston: Brill, 2012: 347-372.
 
“Professionalising their faith: women, religion and the culture of mission and empire.” In Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940, eds. Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries.  London: Routledge, 2010:  117 - 137.
 
“Missionary Manhood: Professionalism, Masculinity and Belief in Nineteenth Century Missions,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies, (Special issue in honour of Professor Andrew N. Porter, Rhodes Imperial Chair, KCL, 2009), Vol. 36 (3), 2008:  397 - 415.