Biography
Emma Wordsworth is a first year Cambridge Trust-funded PhD student in History under the joint supervision of Professor Samita Sen and Dr Bronwen Everill. Emma's research examines the changes in Victorian famine relief discourses across the course of the 1870s and between different geographical spaces. Her four case studies include the famines in Bengal (1873-74), Asia Minor (1873-75), Madras (1876-1878), and North China (1876-1879). She is interested in how English state and non-state actors understood their relative humanitarian responsibility towards the victims of each famine, as well as how they used these understandings to construct a global hierarchy of suffering. She seeks to compare how Victorian famine relief discourses differed within and beyond Britain's formal empire. As part of this research, she will explore English conceptions of famine in relation to ideas about race, gender, class, religion, political economy, demography, land ownership, human-animal relationships, and climate. More broadly, she will examine famine relief’s relationship with British infrastructural development schemes, the integration of agriculturalists into the global market economy (i.e. global food security), and the Victorian 'civilising mission' in India, the Ottoman Empire, and China.
