Spencer Drake

Research Topic

Transatlantic Theology & the Reimagining of New England, 1833-1877

Supervisors: Adam Smith, Stephen Tuffnell

I am a DPhil candidate at Harris Manchester College, having previously earned an MPhil in Modern British History at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge under Professor Peter Mandler, and a BA in History at King’s College London under Dr. Chris Manias. I study Atlantic history in the nineteenth century, with a special focus on the United States' cultural and intellectual ties to the British empire.

My thesis research examines the history of religious nationalism in nineteenth-century Boston, analysing how Protestant preachers utilised British history, memory, and politics as a model by which to measure American nation-building and the essenses of American identity. Using sermons from across the Boston metropole, I survey the religious debates surrounding emancipation, democratic reform, colonial expansion and Reconstruction to understand how transatlantic perspectives informed American politics and its imagined future. 

I have also written extensively on the history of science, with an ongoing journal project dedicated to the history of astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the 1960s-70s United States. This project focuses on the Voyager Golden Record, examining the lives and research of two of the project's directors; astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, to illustrate how their scientific preconceptions filter into the story of human history the record preserves. 

In my free time, I am the president and founder of the Oxford University Beekeeping Society. I have worked for seven years as a freelance beekeeping instructor, installing rooftop hives in London, managing the three collegiate beekeeping societies at the University of Cambridge, and preparing experiments for Cambridge's Department of Biochemistry.

I have presented my research in papers at Britain and the World, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, BrANCH, the European Association of Archaeologists, the Cambridge Cultural History Workshop, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.