Spencer Drake

Research Topic

Transatlantic Theology & the Reimagining of New England, 1833-1877

Supervisors: Adam Smith, Stephen Tuffnell

I am a DPhil candidate at Harris Manchester College, having previously earned an MPhil in Modern British History at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge under Professor Peter Mandler, and a BA in History at King’s College London under Dr. Chris Manias. I study Atlantic history in the nineteenth century, with a special focus on the United States' cultural and intellectual ties to the British empire.

My thesis research examines the history of religious nationalism in nineteenth-century Boston, analysing how Protestant preachers utilised British history, memory, and politics as a model by which to measure American nation-building and the essences of American identity. Using sermons from across the Boston metropole, I survey the religious debates surrounding emancipation, democratic reform, colonial expansion and Reconstruction to understand how transatlantic perspectives informed American politics and its imagined future. 

I have also written extensively on the history of science, with an ongoing journal project dedicated to the history of astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the 1960s-70s United States. This project focuses on the Voyager Golden Record, examining the lives and research of two of the project's directors; astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, to illustrate how their scientific preconceptions filter into the story of human history the record preserves. 

In my free time, I am the president and founder of the Oxford University Beekeeping Society. I have worked for seven years as a freelance beekeeping instructor, installing rooftop hives in London, managing the three collegiate beekeeping societies at the University of Cambridge, and preparing experiments for Cambridge's Department of Biochemistry.

Select Conference Papers:

• The Church and the State on the British Atlantic: Transatlantic Theologians and the ​Development of American Exceptionalism, 1820-1860​ – Society for Historians of the Early American Republic​, Providence, July 2025​
• Pilgrim Diplomacy: The Transatlantic Cultural Politics of Antebellum New England – Britain and the World Conference, Winchester, June 2024
• Human History from a Cosmic Perspective: Postnationalism, Deep Time, and the Voyager Golden Record – National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, January 2026
• Roman Stoicism in Imperial New England, 1830-1860 – European Association of Archaeologists, Rome, August 2024