Dr. Jonathan Stafford

Jonathan Stafford is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of Anglophone Cultural Studies, the history of knowledge, and the Environmental Humanities. His research explores the cultural formations of modernity, with particular attention to the relationships between technology, mobility, knowledge, and the natural environment. His work has been characterised by a sustained engagement with the Blue Humanities, examining the textual, visual, and material cultures of the sea as sites of cultural exchange, global interconnection, and environmental encounter.

His first monograph, Imperial Steam: Modernity on the Sea Route to India (2023), examines imperial voyage narratives as cultural texts through which modernity, imperial identity, and global consciousness were imagined, negotiated, and contested. A postcolonial analysis of the power dynamics, cultural representations, and ideological frameworks of imperialism, it reveals how questions of race, gender, domesticity, mobility, and spatial perception were articulated through the experience and representation of travel within Britain’s imperial networks.  From 2021 to 2025, he was a research associate at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin, where he investigated the cultural history of shipwreck and lifesaving at sea. He is currently a research associate in the ERC-funded project Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility at the University of Regensburg, examining travel writing and the production of environmental knowledge in the early twentieth century, particularly in relation to the emergence of ecological sciences.

• Environmental humanities
• History of science, technology and knowledge
• Blue Humanities
• Visual culture and landscape
• The epistemology of infrastructure and logistics
• Modernity and the natural world
• Mobilities in their cultural contexts
• Cultural Studies