Dr Jeppe Mulich is an LSE Teaching Fellow at our Department. He joined us in September 2015. His research focuses on the global history of empire and colonial expansion in the long nineteenth century, especially in the Atlantic world and in East and Southeast Asia. Most of his work deals with legal and political aspects of this history, including the constitutive qualities of imperial practices; trans-imperial networks and regional integration; hierarchy and international orders; colonial and post-colonial cities; and globalisation as a historical phenomenon.
Dr Mulich obtained a BSc in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen in 2008, an MA from Yale University in 2011, and a PhD in History from New York University in 2015. Before embarking on his postgraduate studies he worked for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He is currently turning his doctoral thesis into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean. His publications include: “The Space between Empires: Coastal and Insular Microregions in the Early Nineteenth-Century World,” with Lauren Benton in The Uses of Space in Early Modern History (2015); and “Microregionalism and Intercolonial Relations: The Case of the Danish West Indies, 1734-1834,” Journal of Global History (2013).
Dr Mulich teaches two undergraduate courses, HY118 (Faith, Power and Revolution: Europe and the Wider World, c.1500-c.1800), HY241 (What is History? Methods and Debates) and one postgraduate course, HY423 (Empire, Colonialism and Globalisation)
Meet our Historian, Dr Jeppe Mulich:
Where do you come from? Where and with whom do you live?
I was born and raised in Denmark, but I’ve been living abroad for the past eight or nine years. These days I live in Dalston with my flat mate, Paul, who’s a lecturer in IR, so there are many late-night esoteric discussions in our house, mostly about politics and speculative fiction.
Why did you want to become an historian?
I actually started out in political science at the University of Copenhagen. After graduating and spending a year as a diplomat at the Danish Mission to the United Nations in New York I realised that history was more appealing to me than politics, especially considering how most political science research is conducted these days. There’s a level of freedom in history that you don’t find in a lot of other disciplines. That freedom allows us to draw on the theories and insights of neighbouring fields, without necessarily getting bogged down by the highly abstract theoretical debates that sometimes go along with them.
What is your favourite library/archive? And why?
While writing my PhD I got to visit archives in Denmark, Sweden, Britain, France, the US, the Caribbean, and Hong Kong, and I would be very hard pressed to pick a favourite. In terms of accessibility and sheer amount of material, it’s hard to beat the National Archives in Kew. The strange cathedral that is Sterling Memorial Library at Yale also holds a special place in my heart, since I’ve spent countless hours reading and hunting through the seemingly endless stacks there.
If you could bring one famous historical person back to life, who would it be and what would you ask him/her?
This is a tough one. I would either want to have dinner with Ching Shih, the Cantonese pirate queen of the South China Sea, who commanded more than 300 vessels and challenged both the British and the Qing empires in the early 1800s, or with Túpac Amaru II, the famous mestizo revolutionary who led an indigenous rebellion against the Spanish Empire in Peru in the 1780s.
If you had a time machine, where and what era would you go?
I’m very happy to be living in the twenty-first century and I’d probably prefer not to go back in time. To paraphrase Hobbes, I think it’s fair to say that the life experiences of the majority of people in the periods I study were rather poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I’ve also been wary of time travel ever since reading Alfred Bester’s short story, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.”
What is the best part of teaching in the Department and the part you enjoy least?
My favourite part is when a seminar is going well and the students are engaging in a rigorous discussion with each other, ideally with as little intervention from me as possible. My least favourite part is administration, but I’m sure that’s true for almost everyone who teaches.
If you could give your younger student self some advice, what would it be?
Breadth of study is good. Specialisation is inevitable down the road, but the first years of university should be used to explore all avenues of inquiry, and being exposed to things you might not otherwise seek out is invaluable.
What is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?
I used to play rugby when I was younger. Given that I was almost always the smallest and scrawniest player on either team that might qualify.
How do you like to relax?
With a glass of bourbon and a good book. Or by watching delightfully awful movies.
What was the last thing that made you laugh out loud?
This cartoon.
How many languages do you speak?
Not enough! I read Danish, English, Swedish, French, Spanish, and a bit of Dutch, but I barely speak anything besides Danish and English. The last couple of years I’ve been learning Traditional Chinese, but that’s proving to be quite a slow process.
What is your favourite fiction book?
It changes every day. It’s probably a toss-up between Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
What is the most memorable place you have ever visited?
I visited Fushimi Inari in Kyoto with MJ, my partner, a couple of years ago and that has to be one of my favourite places on the planet.