Kerry R. Ward
Associate Professor of History
Email: kward [] rice.edu Phone: x2886 Office: 334 Humanities
Education
- Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2002
- M.A. University of Cape Town, 1992
- B.A. Honours, University of Cape Town 1985
- University of Adelaide, Australia, 1984
Areas of Interest
- World History
- Southeast Asian History
- African History
- Comparative slavery and forced migration
- Imperialism and colonialism
Research and Teaching
Dr. Ward came to Rice in 2001 and received her Ph.D from the University of Michigan in 2002. Her major areas of research include imperialism in the early modern world, forced migration in the Indian Ocean, and the memory and representation of slavery and bondage in museums and exhibitions.
Her book, Imperial Networks: Free and Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company examines the Dutch East India Company as the first multi-national company of the modern era, in business from 1602-1699. Imperial Networks argues that the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie – VOC) also operated as an “empire within a state.” It exercised sovereignty in its Indian Ocean realm beyond the restraint and control of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The manuscript grapples with broad theoretical issues on the nature of empire. What constitutes an empire over time and space? The primary metaphor of the “rise and fall” of empires has less explanatory power than that of the “integration and disintegration” of imperial circuits. Imperial Networks argues that the tensions, fault-lines and fissures within the VOC empire were inherent to the dynamics of the imperial expansion. An empire inevitably involves exploitation and subjugation of people who are drawn willingly or unwillingly into its realm. But how are empires peopled? How is the movement and settlement of people controlled within empires? This case study elaborates on a new approach to the concept of diaspora to demonstrate that all empires have specific and unique networks of free and forced migration through which imperial rulers and subjects are constituted, and through which people collaborate and resist the control over their bodies and their fates.
Dr. Ward regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate survey courses in world history. She also teaches undergraduate courses in forced migration in the modern world, comparative South African and Indonesian history, comparative slavery of Africa, Asia and Europe, Indian Ocean history, and the Southeast Asian sections of the Introduction to Asian Civilizations undergraduate survey course.
Selected Publications
- Networks of Empire: Forced Migration and the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- ‘“Tavern of the Seas?” The Cape of Good Hope as an oceanic crossroads during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ in Jerry Bentley, Karen Wigen and Renata Bridenthal eds., Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming 2007.
- “Defining and defiling the criminal body at the Cape of Good Hope: Punishing the crime of suicide under Dutch East India Company rule c1652-1795,” in Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao eds., Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
- “Captive Audiences: Remembering and forgetting the history of slavery in Cape Town, South Africa,” in P Ahluwalia and P Nursey-Bray eds., Post Colonialism: Post-colonial identity in Africa. New York: Nova Social Science Press 1997.
- “The making of Mamre: community, identity and migration in a Western Cape village, c1838-1938,” in N. Worden and C. Crais eds., Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
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Networks of Empire:
Forced Migration and
the Dutch East India
Company (2008)
|
“Knocking on Death’s Door:
Mapping the Spectrums of
Bondage and Status through
Marking the Dead at the
Cape,”Contingent Lives:
Social Identity and Material
Culture in the VOC World (2007) |
Curriculum Vitae
Links