Jessi Gilchrist

Jessi Gilchrist is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies and a doctoral fellow at the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy where her research explores imperial borders and their legacies in our contemporary international laws.

Originally from the rural Canadian prairies, Jessi began her studies at Brandon University in 2014 where she completed a Bachelor of Arts (honours) with a major in history and a Bachelor of Music specializing in flute performance. In 2018, she entered the two-year MA history programme at the University of Western Ontario where she was funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s. Under the supervision of Francine McKenzie, she successfully defended her MA thesis entitled “Global Governance and Imperial Entanglements: Cooperation, Conflict, and Catastrophe in Anglo-Italian Relations, 1922-1940” in summer 2020. She went on to work with Margaret MacMillan at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto on her second MA project entitled “Reconsidering the Locarno System: Great Britain, Fascist Italy, and the Imperial Roots of the Postwar Global Order, 1922-1925.”

In addition to her PhD studies, Jessi currently works as an analyst for the Geopolitics and National Security Learning Program at the Canada School of Public Service.

 

Research Interests:

Her current PhD project, “Fictitious Frontiers: Italian Libya, British Egypt, and the Making of International Law, 1910-1956,” focuses on the Libyan-Egyptian colonial frontier as a point of departure to explore how the British and Italian empires attempted to govern this inter-imperial border; how ideology shaped imperial policy and practice towards colonial border security; and what the experience of this colonial border tell us about the role of international law in mediating, formalizing, and entrenching the imperial system within the twentieth-century global order. In doing so, her PhD project aims to offer a new interpretation of how empire really worked and why it remained so durable over the course of the twentieth century.

• History of empire

• Borderlands, frontiers, and migration

• Colonial intelligence

• Anti-colonial resistance

• Italian Fascism

• Middle East & North Africa 

 

Thesis title: “Fictitious Frontiers: British Egypt, Italian Libya, and the Making of International Law, 1910-1956.” 

Supervisors: Mark Condos and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

 

Recent Publications:

Research Articles

• “Sharing Empire: Great Britain, Fascist Italy, and (Anti-)Colonial Intelligence Networks in the Palestine Mandate, 1933-1940.” Intelligence and National Security, Published Online: 9 August 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2022.2104507
• “‘Clouds of mutual suspicion’: Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement in the Mediterranean.” The International History Review, Published Online: 14 July 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2021.1925945

Book Reviews

• “Book Review: Vanda Wilcox’s The Italian Empire and the Great War.” International Journal, https://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221097992

Media Articles

• “The Boeing 737 MAX Settlement: An American ‘Solution’ to an International Disaster.” Duck of Minerva, August 2022.
• “Deconstructing Dominant Narratives Through Progressive Metal,” ActiveHistory, December 2020.
• “Could Covid Cure Classical Music?” ActiveHistory, July 2020.

 

Research centres and groups:

• Centre for Grand Strategy
• Empires and Decolonization Research Hub