Dr Kate Tilson
Departmental Lecturer in the History of Medicine
I am a historian of modern Britain and Oceania, specialising in the history of medicine, missions, empire, evangelical Christianity, and print culture.
I am completing my first monograph, which examines how British missions in the South Pacific shaped the production of medical knowledge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A theme throughout the book is the development of a global evangelical print culture, which circulated ideas of physical and spiritual health, morality, and self-improvement.
I am also commencing several new projects, the first of which explores the history of evangelicalism and surgery in maritime contexts in the long nineteenth century. The second is a history of childhood in missionary and imperial contexts.
With Aayushi Gupta, I am putting together an edited volume on the mobility and materiality of missionary sources, and the types of historical connection that can be drawn between print, letters, oral culture, dreams, photographs, and objects.
I was previously a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. I completed my PhD at Cambridge, as a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar, and my undergraduate studies at the University of Otago - Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.
Publications
'Assembling Home in the Mission Field: Evangelical Periodical Culture in Britain and Tahiti, ca. 1790s–1830s'
Journal of British Studies 65 (2026).
This article explores the complex cultural processes that engineered the production and circulation of British evangelical periodicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It draws on a vast collection of missionary archival material from Tahiti to show the patched-together character of evangelical periodicals, constituted by highly mobile texts that connected readers across vast geographic distances. Furthermore, it illustrates how readers responded to periodicals: how they represented the intellectual worlds of the early missionaries and complicated their conceptualizations of home and mission, in particular. The article avoids characterizing periodicals as purely propaganda, instead examining how they worked to extend evangelical networks and how they fit into wider systems of knowledge production. The article makes contributions to the study of religion, media, and the materiality of knowledge, bringing the evangelical knowledge industry into a globalized context that intersected with the mission field.
Masters Students
Histories of mission, medicine, print culture, the Pacific, New Zealand, the Modern British Empire