Dr. Jakob Burnham (he/him) is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the World, with a particular focus on France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean during the 17th and 18th centuries. His research questions the ways that everyday encounters between people--from getting married to going to the doctor to the examinations of dead bodies--proved to be critical sites of colonial production in the early modern world. He teaches various graduate and undergraduate courses at UNT, including: "European Empires and the Early Modern World", "Introduction to the Medical Humanities", "History of Medicine in the West, 1400-Present", and "Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe," among others.

His first project, Producing Pondichéry: Social Lives and Urban Colonialism in the French Indian Ocean, 1664-1757, considers how settlers, colonial bureaucrats, and other itinerant populations from around the Indian Ocean moved within and between French colonial spaces in the region. Analyzing notarial records, correspondence, court records, and other archival documents in France, India, and the United Kingdom, his research studies the development of Pondichéry and the other French colonies in the Indian Ocean into global nexuses. The daily lives of South Asian communities, European agent-colonizers, and other world travelers emphasizes colonialism as a socially based process as much as an economically based one. In doing so, his research engages an alternate viewpoint to analyze French colonial entrenchment across the Indian Ocean from the more traditional focus on eighteenth-century trading companies or plantation societies.

His future research continues to question the importance of everyday life in understanding colonial histories by looking more deeply at histories of medicine and histories of labor connecting Europe, the Indian Ocean, Europe, and the Chinese coast. Dr. Burnham is currently working on a critical edition/translation of a primary source, entitled The Trial of Catou: Prosecuting Abortion in Eighteenth-Century French India. The source recounts the trial records of a young South Asian women accused of seeking an abortion to end her extra-marital pregnancy. The French colonial officials attempted to uncover her guilt from numerous witnesses and collected many conflicting accounts in the process, which paint a rich picture of life in the colony. These trial records bring to light the nuances and contexts of French colonial realities in early modern South Asia, while at the same time revealing the complicated intersections of domesticity, medical and reproductive history, and urban community. Other future works include a study of mid-eighteenth-century indentured labor networks between Southeast Asia, French India, and the French Colonies on Ile de Bourbon and Ile de France, as well as a longer project on family-centered financial networks linking London and Paris with India and China in the late seventeenth century.

Selected Publication Highlights:

"Notes on a Monstrous Fetus" Journal for the Western Society of French History (Forthcoming, December 2024)

"Call in the Midwife: Gendered Medical Knowledge and Colonial Intermediaries in French India" Nursing Clio (Forthcoming, September 2024)

"Fetal Remains, Knowledge, and the Making of Early Modern Monsters" Nursing Clio (3 April 2024)

"Pensioning Pondicherry's Enfants and Orphelins: Social Welfare and the French East India Company in eighteenth-century French India" in Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population, edited by Margaret Cook Andersen and Melissa K. Byrnes. London: Palgrave-Macmillan (December 2023)

"A Tale of Two Deaths: Chronic Illness, Race, and the Medicalization of Suicide" Nursing Clio (21 February 2023).

Degroot, Dagomar, Kevin Anchukaitis, Martin Bauch, Jakob Burnham, Fred Carnegy, Jianxin Cui, Kathryn de Luna, et al. "Towards a Rigorous Understanding of Societal Responses to Climate Change." Nature 591, no. 7851 (March 2021): 539-50.

Selection Grants and Awards:

2023-2024 Writer in Residence, Nursing Clio

2022 Research Fellowship, Medical Humanities Initiative, Georgetown University

2020 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, US Department of Education

2019 Marjorie M. and Lancelot L. Farrar Memorial Research Fellowship, Society for French Historical Studies