Kyle Prochnow
Kyle Prochnow specializes in the history of Africa and the Atlantic world, with a focus on colonialism, warfare, tropical disease, and slavery and abolition. He is currently working on a book manuscript, Britain’s Black Battalions: African Soldiers, War, and Empire in the British Atlantic Tropics, that reconstructs the lives and military labor of Black soldiers conscripted for lifetime service in Great Britain’s trans-Atlantic West India Regiments. The project intertwines histories of slavery and abolition, race, disease, and war to present a different kind of story of the imperial Atlantic as explored through the experiences of Black rank-and-file solders. At Ursinus College, he teaches courses in world history, African history, British imperial history, and the history of disease and medicine.
Department
Degrees
B.A., Saint Mary’s College of California
M.A., Boston College
Ph.D., York University
Teaching
African history
Atlantic history
Empires and colonialism
History of disease and medicine
Research Interests
African soldiers
Race and colonial recruitment
Tropical disease and medicine
British empire
Slavery and abolition
Recent Work
“‘Saving an extraordinary expense to the nation’: African recruitment for the West India Regiments in the British Atlantic world,” Atlantic Studies 18.2 (2021): 149-171.
“‘Perpetual expatriation’: Forced Migration and Liberated African Apprenticeship in the Gambia,” in Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896, ed. Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2020), 347-364.
