Arianne Sedef Urus is an assistant professor in the Faculty of History. Her research concerns the links between the environment, law, and empire in the early modern Atlantic World. She is currently working on a book, Common Shores, about interimperial resource management regimes and Franco-British competition over the Newfoundland cod fisheries in the eighteenth century. This study of the Newfoundland fishery shows a different model of empire-building in the Atlantic World to that which historians have previously identified, premised on the strategic sharing of natural resources rather than exclusive possession of them. Moreover, this model was not one crafted purely at the imperial center, but rather was the product of interactions from top to bottom, across cultures, across national imperial regimes, and across oceans. An article based on this research has appeared in Environmental History.
Urus's latest research project, Ottoman Florida, looks at the failed eighteenth-century British colony of New Smyrna in East Florida to explore how questions of environmental justice between British, Spanish, Ottoman, and Muscogee Creek inhabitants intersected with ideas about climate and wider interimperial geopolitics. She teaches early American, Atlantic, and environmental history.
Arianne received her PhD in History from New York University and her BA in history from Northwestern University. Prior to her arrival at Christ's, she was a lecturer on History at Literature at Harvard University, a postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the associate editor of the Radical History Review.
