Assistant Professor

American Maritime History

Pronouns: she/her

Email: [email protected]

 

 

 

 

 

Courses 2020-21:
MAST/ENVI 263 The Global Ocean: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Fall)

MAST/ENVI 263 The Global Ocean: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Spring)
HIST 130 Rioting in British History (Spring)

Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz, History

Graduate Institution: University of Arizona, Modern European History and World/Comparative History

Research Areas:

• Sailors and their families
• Everyday life
• Gender, welfare, and the state
• Popular culture
• Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland

Sofia’s research examines British and Irish sailors and their families from 1770-1820. She explores their everyday lives and the ways in which society reinforced patriarchal structures through the law, welfare, and popular culture, using sailors’ families as their focus. She has presented this work at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, and the Western Conference on British Studies. In completing her Ph.D., Sofia conducted her research in more than a dozen archives, libraries, and museums in ports in Britain and Ireland, utilizing sources ranging from Admiralty records to broadsheet ballads.

Sofia looks forward to working with Williams-Mystic students, taking advantage of the many opportunities the area provides for students to interact with and navigate America’s maritime past and how it informs our present. Within her discipline, she often looks for ways to incorporate the lived experiences of people in the past — what it felt like, looked like, even smelled like — to live through these moments in history. In teaching this course, she hopes students come away with a greater sense of those experiences, and a stronger understanding of how systems sometimes felt to be long-removed, from the Transatlantic slave trade to the whaling industry, shape our lives today.