New Appointments: Postdoctoral Fellows

Matthew Birchall specialises in British imperial history, with a particular focus on chartered companies in colonial Australia and New Zealand. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2021. His dissertation, “Company Colonisation and the Settler Revolution, 1820-1840,” argues that joint-stock companies, rather than the imperial state, were at the vanguard of emigration and colonisation in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Drawing on a wide range of material in archives scattered across the world – published writings, parliamentary testimony, company minute books, personal correspondence, and Colonial Office memoranda – this thesis shows how the company men at the centre of these enterprises imagined, and briefly realised, a corporate empire that stretched across the oceans. Matthew’s thesis was highly commended by the judges of the Australian Historical Society’s Serle Award. He is reworking the dissertation into a scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled Corporate Conquest: How Companies Built Britain’s Settler Empire, 1815-1850.

At UNSW, Matthew will work on a population-based study of colonial South Australia, Western Australia, and New Zealand. These colonies were established on the economic and social theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an influential English political economist and colonial promoter. He will also lead a project exploring the place of population in the history of global capitalism.

Leo Chu is currently finishing his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His thesis, “Harvesting Diversity: Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Transformation of the Green Revolution, 1950-2000,” examines how agronomists, anthropologists, and ecologists shaped agricultural research in the region and how the Cold War developmentalism influenced contemporary discourses of sustainability.

At the Laureate Centre, he will expand the project by analyzing the significance of rural population and family planning in Taiwan’s postwar economic development, and how scientists and officials used Taiwan’s population policies to craft multiple contested ideas of territory and national identity amid shifting geopolitical contexts.

Hazal Ozdemir is completing her PhD in the History Department of Northwestern University. Her work primarily focuses on migration, displacement, and belonging in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East. Her dissertation reconstructs late Ottoman policies of denaturalization and shows how surveillance methods devised to control the mobility of a population, including a photographic archive, were a crucial part of a broad repertoire of state violence aimed at Armenian transatlantic migrants. Her second project shifts the focus to the mobility of Armenian women in the aftermath of WWI after nearly two decades of total war and the eradication of Ottoman social welfare sites in the early Turkish Republic. This work considers how Armenian women drew on networks between cities and their hinterlands, developing circular and short-term labor migration as a strategy for economic survival after the de-population of the Armenian community. Before coming to Northwestern, Ozdemir graduated from Boğaziçi University’s (Istanbul, Turkey) Department of History in 2017. She received her master’s degree from the History of Art and Photography program at Birkbeck, University of London.