Daniel O. Spence

Daniel Owen Spence is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, and holds an Innovation Scholarship with the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He is an imperial and transnational historian working on the nineteenth and twentieth-century maritime history of the British Empire, addressing issues of racial identity, imperial discourses of power, colonial navalism, the cultural impact of war, and the role of the navy in post-colonial nation-building.

He studied at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), being awarded the Russell Finch History Prize in 2009 for his MA dissertation, ‘Identity, Mutiny and Indianisation: A Cultural Re-appraisal of the Royal Indian Navy, 1946-1958’ (part of which will be published shortly as an article in South Asia: Journal of the South Asian Studies), and passed his PhD viva with no corrections in May 2012 with his thesis titled 'Imperialism and Identity in British Colonial Naval Culture, 1930s to Decolonisation'. Between 2007 and 2011 he was an Associate Lecturer at SHU, before being appointed to a Lectureship in Imperial and International History there for the 2011/12 academic year. Dr Spence is an inaugural member of the British Empire at War Research Group, and member of the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC).

He has conducted archival and oral research in Kenya, Zanzibar, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Trinidad and Tobago, the Cayman Islands, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and is currently completing two book projects. One, titled Colonial Naval Culture and British Imperialism, 1922-1967, builds on his PhD and will be published in Manchester University Press' long-running 'Studies in Imperialism' series. The other, A History of the Royal Navy: Empire and Imperialism, is part of a new fourteen-volume series in collaboration with I.B. Tauris and the National Museum of the Royal Navy.