Dr David Hitchcock - ePortfolio
Associate Fellow, Warwick Department of History
Lecturer in early modern history, Canterbury Christ Church University
Welcome to my electronic research portfolio. I submitted my PhD thesis and successfully defended it on January 14, 2013. I held an early career post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Studies in 2012-13, and am now an Associate Fellow of the Warwick History Department in addition to holding a lectureship at Canterbury Christ Church University. This summer I will be visiting the Huntington Library in California as a Research Fellow for three months.
Broadly speaking, my research interests are 'early modern', though I would be considered a very late early modernist by most scholars, as my research expertise drops off sharply before about 1550 or so. My personal areas of interest are: vagrancy, subsistence mobility and mobility more broadly, mendacity, forced migration, comparative social history, the cultural history of poverty, the history of summary justice and master/servant law, and the history of penal transportation.
My doctoral work focused on the social and cultural history of vagrancy in England, between 1650 and 1750. I have published on local migration, justice, and vagrancy in England in Rural History (21:3, 2012), and authored an annotated bibliography on poverty in the English Atlantic for Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford Bibliographies Online). I have guest edited a special issue of Rural History (CUP), which is available online as of April 2013. I have a book under contract with Bloomsbury academic press, slated for April 2015, entitled 'Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750'.
I am in the planning stages of a new project which examines the 'problems of mobility in the early modern English Atlantic'. I want to compare the mobility of vagrants and enslaved peoples, and assess why the mechanisms and structures of control surrounding both groups appear so eerily similar to present sensibilities. The project would broadly cover the 'English' Atlantic betwen 1650 and 1800.
If you have a particular interest in my work, or questions about teaching, you are always welcome to contact me by email david dot hitchcock at canterbury dot ac dot uk.
Specialization: English Social History
on Twitter: @Hitchcockian
Supervisors
Professor Steve Hindle
Professor Mark Knights
Contact Me
Email: david dot hitchcock at Canterbury dot ac dot uk
A Tinker from a commonplace facsimilie of Marcellus Laroon's Cryes of London.
This version is from 1796.
William Hogarth's Idle Prentice at Play in the Church-yard.