Bio

J. Connell Stryker is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.  She obtained her MA in History at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and her BA at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM.  With maritime archaeologist Eric Ray, she studied the firepots aboard the seventeenth century ship La Belle, including testing recreations.  At Memorial, she worked with the Maritime History Archives, and in particular, the Ships and Seafarers database, compiled by the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project (ACSP).  Her work with the database focused on sailing ship stewardesses in the nineteenth century to examine the intersection of gender, labor, and maritime culture in Britain, Canada, and the United States. 

Her dissertation project builds on her Masters work to encompass the mythologizing of the maritime past, the redefinition of the empire, and the role of technology in Britain in the long nineteenth century.  As the social and material circumstances of predominance at sea changed – as in employment patterns, new regulations, the visceral differences between sail and steam, and new demographics of seafaring labor – so did the Empire.  Examining women’s work at sea reveals the divides between masculine and feminine, sail and steam, and nationalist imaginary and practical reality underlying the seen and unseen tensions which led to the undoing of Britain’s maritime empire.

She also works with race and theories of embodiment, especially in her investigation of innovations in ship ventilation over the eighteenth century and the health and experiential consequences of ventilation on slaving vessels.  Digital humanities are a key component of her research on continuing projects, her own databases as well as the ACSP databases and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.  She is interested in application of digital tools and public-facing research in the context of the humanities, including coding, 3d printing, makerspaces, and public history projects.