Jacob Selwood

Jacob Selwood researches and teaches the history of the early modern British world. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2003 under the supervision of Cynthia Herrup and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Carleton University. His most recent book, At Kingdom’s Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject (Cornell University Press, 2022), investigates how life in a conquered colony both revealed and shaped what it meant to be English outside of the British Isles. Examining the case of Jeronimy Clifford, who rose to become one of Suriname's richest planters, the book investigates how life on the colonial periphery shaped subjecthood in the early modern world. His first book, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Ashgate, 2010), offered a comparative study of Londoners’ reactions to a diverse range of immigrants and their English-born children, together with the implications of these responses for our understanding of early modern English national identity.