Dr Robbie Richardson
About
Robbie Richardson joined the School of English in 2013 after a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His book The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2018) examines the representations of North American ‘Indians’ in novels, poetry, plays, and material culture from eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that depictions of ‘Indians’ in British literature were used to critique and articulate evolving ideas about consumerism, colonialism, ‘Britishness,’ and, ultimately, the ‘modern self’ over the course of the century. He was recently awarded a travel grant at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University to study the ways in which British antiquarians studied and understood Indigenous people in the light of their own ‘primitive’ past. He is editing an upcoming special issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction titled ‘The Indigenous Eighteenth Century.’ You can hear him discuss Indigenous people and Canadian identity on Radio 3 here.