Department of History

Jessica Harland-Jacobs works in the history of the British Empire, the Atlantic world, and comparative imperialism. She received her BA in history from Cornell University in 1992 and her MA and PhD (2000) from Duke University. Her first book, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. She has published in the Journal of Religious History, Journal of British Studies, Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, The Geographical Review, Atlantic Studies, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Her current book project concerns the question of how empires manage religious diversity by examining the incorporation of Catholic colonies into the British Empire from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. It explores British attitudes and policies towards their “new subjects” as well as the experiences of Catholics as they became subjects of a Protestant empire in a period of global war and imperial expansion.

A winner of department, college, and university teaching awards, Professor Harland-Jacobs teaches courses and trains graduate students in modern Britain and the British Empire, Ireland, imperialism, and the Atlantic world. She has directed multiple senior theses and University Scholars and welcomes the opportunity to work with undergraduates on research projects.

Recent Publications

The Fraternal Atlantic: Race, Revolution, and Transnationalism in the Worlds of Freemasonry (co-edited with Elizabeth Mancke and Jan Jansen). New York: Routledge, 2021.

“Multi-confessional Governance: Incorporating Catholics in the British Empire, 1713-1783,” in James Vaughan and Robert Olwell, eds., Envisioning Empire: The New British World from 1763 to 1773. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

“Ireland, 1916: The Rising and the War,” The Conversation (14 April 2016).

“Incorporating the King’s New Subjects: Accommodation and Anti-Catholicism in the British Empire, 1713-1815,” Journal of Religious History 39, 2 (June 2015): 203-23.

Oxford Bibliographies Online: “Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery” (2022) and Networks for Migrations and Mobility” (2013).

Selected Keynote Lectures and Public Talks

“Freemasonry, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World,” Maine Masonic College, 24 October 2020, Bangor, ME

“Atlantic Georgia,” The Global Georgia Initiative (funded by the Mellon Foundation), University of Georgia (2020)

“Two Islands, Three Empires, One Brotherhood,” Tercentenary Celebration of the Grand Lodge of England, District Grand Lodge of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, Montego Bay, Jamaica (2018)

“Ireland, 1916: The Rising and the War,” Center for European Studies, University of Florida (2016)

“The British Empire and the Natural World, “Knowing Nature: Naturalist Illustration from Art to Science series, Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (2011)

Recent Conference Papers and Workshops

“Catholic Emancipation in the Era of Crown Colony Governance,” North American Conference on British Studies Conference, Vancouver, Canada (2019)

“The Incorporation of Catholic New Subjects and the Problem of the Oath after 1763,” The Omohundro Institute Conference, Pittsburgh, PA (2019)

“In between the religious and the secular: ‘Controlled accommodation’ and imperial Freemasonry as emergent secularities of the 19th-century British Empire,” Emergent Spheres of the Secular in Colonial Asia workshop, Humanities Centre, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany (2017)