Dr Oliver Charbonneau is a historian of US foreign relations whose scholarship focuses on the role of colonial empire in American history. My first book, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2020. It investigates the complex, multi-decade occupation of the Islamic Philippines by the United States. Sections of the project intersect with my broader interest in the history of colonial warfare and the ways wars are imagined, planned, and conducted in “peripheral” environments against racialised adversaries. Although these engagements pervade the history of Euro-American warfighting, from the Iberian conquest of Latin America in the sixteenth century to Western military engagements in the contemporary Muslim world, they remained poorly understood and are frequently lumped under the catch-all category of “counterinsurgency.” My research connects interdisciplinary literatures on race, gender, and empire with military histories of colonial wars in an effort to provide multi-perspective analysis on these events. Beyond my research specialisation, I am also interested in comparative histories of mass violence, transimperial histories of military governance, and the role of violent frontier zones in state and identity formation.

First published: 25 November 2019

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Charbonneau, Oliver