Dr Elly Robson Dezateux

History BA Honours, University of Cambridge; MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, University of Cambridge; History PhD, University of Cambridge

I completed my masters and doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. This research was supported by grants from the AHRC, Wolfson Foundation, Royal Historical Society, and Huntington Library. 

In 2018, I was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, where I served as an academic member and secretary for the Legacies of Slavery Inquiry between 2019 and 2022. I was also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History. 

Prior to joining Christ Church, I was a lecturer in early modern history at Birkbeck and a tutor at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge.

I am a historian of early modern Britain and the Atlantic world, with expertise in public history, environmental history, and legacies of colonialism. 

My research to date has examined the environmental politics generated by ambitious projects of agricultural improvement and colonial plantation in early modern Britain and the Atlantic world, investigating wetlands, woodlands, and islands as sites of reform and conflict.

Drawing on approaches to global micro-history, my current research investigates entanglements between transnational networks, political and educational institutions, and ‘small places’ in the British empire.

I am the managing editor of History Workshop, a digital magazine of radical history, which provides a platform for work that crosses boundaries between academia and the world and brings the past into dialogue with the present.

I am an editor of History Workshop Journal. I am also a Research Associate at the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge, and an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.

Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England (monograph forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2025)

‘Fen plantation: Calvinism, commons, and the boundaries of belonging in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies 63, no. 1 (2024), 1-33: https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.72

‘The edges of governance: practices and principles of justice in seventeenth-century fen petitions’ in The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, eds. Brodie Waddell and Jason Peacey (UCL Press, 2024): https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.8731494.12.

‘Environmental histories of agriculture in early modern Britain and Ireland’, co-authored with Eugene Costello and John Morgan
Agricultural History Review 71, no. 2 (2023), 137-59: https://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLE.html?ID=747&MOD=this.

‘Improvement and epistemologies of landscape in seventeenth-century English forest enclosure’, The Historical Journal 60 (2017), 597-632: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X16000261