Philip Reid

I'm Phillip Reid and I'm working on a doctoral thesis in maritime history under Neil Kennedy. I'm exploring "Merchant Ship Technology and the Development of the British Atlantic Empire, 1600-1800," and with the assistance of Prof. Dan Walker in ocean & marine engineering and the shipwrights and masters of today's working period replica ships, we are getting outside the library and archive and using hands-on experiences, a treasure trove of expertise rarely tapped by the academy, and the tools and techniques of applied science to learn things about the technology that made our world what it is that our written sources alone can't teach us. We're also expanding on what shipwreck archaeology has taught us, as virtual ships and real ships can talk to us in ways that the silent deteriorated remains of wooden hulls  cannot.

I'm excited to be presenting preliminary findings and ongoing work on the analysis of replica vessels and the experiences of their personnel next month at the annual conference of the North American Society for Oceanic History in Monterey, California. I'm grateful to NASOH and to MUN for providing funds to make that possible.

This summer I'll be continuing to talk to replica masters and shipwrights, and I'll be traveling for two months to archives in the northeastern U.S., looking at business records and correspondence to learn about how merchants and shipwrights made technical judgments that would drastically affect their fortunes. Many thanks to the Dept. of History for awarding me Scholarship in the Arts funding to undertake summer research travel, and to the Peabody Essex Museum-Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts, for awarding me a short-term fellowship to work in their collections.

I plan to write the thesis this fall and complete it by December. Once it has passed, my next priority will be securing postdoctoral support to expand it into a book. For a video summary on my dissertation work see https://vimeo.com/98436706.