Jill Bender

Jill Bender

Visiting Scholar

Jill Bender is a historian of the modern British Empire, particularly interested in the various connections and networks that drew together the disparate colonies of the nineteenth-century empire. Her first book, “The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire” (Cambridge University Press, 2016), traced the repercussions of the 1857 rebellion across Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony in southern Africa. Her current book project allows her to continue her interests in mid-nineteenth-century colonial connections and power relations. In this study, she examines the famine-era migration of women from Ireland’s workhouses to colonies in Australia, Canada, and southern Africa.

She earned her Ph.D. in History at Boston College and her M.A. in Culture and Colonialism at the University of Galway.