Alexander Insley
BA History, University of Oxford (2020-2023)
MA Atlantic History & Politics, University of Missouri (2023-2024)
My research interests are in African American history, the history of the worldwide African Diaspora, and Imperial History. I am interested in the ways that subaltern peoples navigated and negotiated racial and personal identities within imperial spaces. My dissertation, entitled The Burden of Loyalty: African Americans and Cultures of Empire in the Age of U.S. Overseas Expansion, examines the lives of African Americans embroiled in imperial spaces during the age of American overseas expansion and empire. This project explores the contradictory prospects that imperial entanglements offered amidst a nadir for race relations, including the advent of novel opportunities that simultaneously reified white supremacy. I examine the various forms this manifested as, placing African Americans as central actors in turn-of-the-century debates over the formation of America’s empire.
Review of The Overseer State: Slavery, Indenture and Governance in the British Empire, 1812-1916, by Sascha Auerbach, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies (Forthcoming, 2026).
Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grant, 2026.
Lynn and Kristen Morrow Missouri History Student Prize, awarded by the Missouri Conference on History, 2026.
W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2026.
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship, 2026
Robert N. Epsten Scholarship in International Studies Award, awarded by the Truman Good Neighbor Foundation, 2026.
Graduate Professional Council Conference Presentation Travel Award, 2026.
Kinder Institute Conference Travel Award, 2026.
University of Missouri History Graduate Teaching Fellowship, 2026.
Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, and Kinder Institute Graduate Assistantship in Oxford, 2026.
Kinder Institute Research Travel Award, 2025.
Wilcher Endowment Travel Award, University of Missouri History Faculty, 2025.
Kinder Institute Graduate Assistantship in Oxford, 2025.
University of Oxford & Kinder Institute Masters Fellowship, 2023-2024.