Discourses of Poverty 1490-1800

Principal researchers:  Peter Goddard, History, and Kimberley Martin, Ridley Postdoc in Digital Humanities.

Summer 2017 Research Assistants (UG):  Dylan Armstrong, Nicole Barkwill and Lara Carleton

Research into colonizer/settler attitudes and changing conceptions of poverty and their application in the Atlantic World in the age of European colonial expansion.

Research involves digital approaches (Voyant, Python) and transnational, multi-lingual database.

We use digital techniques to understand shift or dominance of linguistic schemes reflecting  market/quantitative language.  Project architecture seeks to link linguistic schemes related to people and to the natural world to the forms of language characteristic of early modern “explorer”/colonist avidity, and provide a new way to understand the emergence of damaging stereotypes of indigenous “poverty” in colonial North America.