About Me

I am a historian of the United States and the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research explores the connections between race and nationality in the after the American Civil War. My dissertation examined how different configurations of this relationship were formulated through transnational travel and performance in Britain between the American Civil War and World War I. I am especially interested in the role that the mechanics of cultural transmission, from steamships to telegraph cables to lithographic posters, played in entrenching certain ideas about Americanness both at home and abroad. I'm currently working on expanding the scope of my PhD and turning it into a book manuscript. 

I'm also beginning a new project on US overseas nationals in warzones. I hope to trace the changing relationship between these citizens and their home government's actions from the Spanish-American War to the beginning of World War II. I am writing an article about neutrality and the assistance the US government to 'stranded' American citizens in Europe and the Ottoman Empire at the outbreak of World War I. I also have a chapter forthcoming in an edited collection about Americans in Liberia at the beginning of World War I.

I am an Irish Research Council (IRC) Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University. Before this, I was a temporary Assistant Professor in American History at the University of Cambridge for two years. Prior to that, I spent a year as an assistant lecturer at Maynooth. I completed my doctoral work at Cambridge in 2021, and was funded by AHRC and the Isaac Newton Trust. My thesis, titled "Performing American Identity in Great Britain, 1880-1914" won the Sara Norton prize for best dissertation in US history. I have a master's in Modern History from Durham University, where I won the Michie Prize for best MA thesis, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Warwick, where I didn't win anything. 

Outside of work, I like football (soccer) and DIY music, broadly construed. 

If you have any questions, or would like to see my CV, you can contact me at lewis.defrates [at] mu.ie or lewis.defrates [at] gmail.com. You and can also follow me on twitter