Dr Kathryn Simpson

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Kathryn Simpson

Postdoctoral Fellow September 2018 - February 2019

Project: Boundaries of gender: ‘petticoat governments’ and secondary voices in nineteenth century European expeditions of Africa

My research looks at manuscripts of 19th century European exploration in Africa and India. This research is grounded in using XML-TEI from which to develop 19th century cultural digital content and its subsequent curation; including imaging, data management, transcription, and mapping. I am Project Scholar and UK Outreach Director for Livingstone Online (http://livingstoneonline.org), and a lecturer in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University. I was recently an MHRA research associate at Queen’s University Belfast, working on a digital edition of explorer and missionary David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels (1857).

My project at IASH - Boundaries of gender: ‘petticoat governments’ and secondary voices in nineteenth century European expeditions of Africa - foregrounds the many women, both European and African, who assisted and enabled David Livingstone (1813-1873) in his journeys in Africa, specifically during the Second Zambesi expedition (1858 -1864). It will explore the written archival record to find the unarticulated narratives of women. By identifying these women and mapping the locations and influence of them, I aim to unpeel the patriarchal and western hegemonic narratives of exploration, to show the more complex and culturally ambiguous story of nineteenth century African exploration.

Recent publication:

 Reading Exploration Through the Digital Library, Livingstone Online (2017). http://www.livingstoneonline.org/about-this-site/reading-exploration-through-the-digital-library

 ‘Disruption and Renaissance: Alexander Duff and the role of missionary education in early nineteenth century Bengal’. Scottish Orientalism and the Indian Renaissance: The Continuum of Ideas. Eds. B Fraser, T. Mukherjee, A. Sen. Luath Press