Dr Hilary Buxton
American Philosophical Society Fellow, June - July 2024
Home Institution: Kenyon College
Hilary Buxton is an Assistant Professor of History at Kenyon College. She is a historian of modern imperial Britain, focusing on histories of colonial intimacy and the production of knowledge. Her articles have appeared in Past & Present and the British Journal for the History of Science. She earned her PhD in History at Rutgers University, and was a Past & Present Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London before joining Kenyon.
Project title: Disabled Empire: Decolonizing Care and the First World War in Imperial Britain
Buxton will be working on her book manuscript, Disabled Empire: Decolonizing Care and the First World War in Imperial Britain. The project examines the experiences of wounded and disabled British colonial servicemen, their relationship with caregivers and the imperial state, and the lasting medical inequities produced out of this transcolonial encounter. Whether in the form of ethnic-specific diets, the provision of impractical prosthetics, or discounting trauma through racialized stigmas, colonial soldiers navigated a system whose diagnostics and treatments denied them the same level of care as their white counterparts. At the same time, the conflict forced the British state to reckon with new debts. Imperial servicemen were not passive subjects in a wartime laboratory, but vocal participants who demanded a say in their care.