Jack Englehardt

Jack Englehardt is a full-time PhD candidate in the Department of International History. Jack holds a BA in International Relations and Modern History from the University of St Andrews, as well as a MSc in Empires, Colonialism, and Globalisation from LSE, and a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) from the University of Sussex. He is a qualified secondary schoolteacher who has taught both history and geography in London-area state schools. Jack continues to work with educational nonprofits to empower young students through beyond-the-curriculum learning, including as an EPQ mentor and tutor with LSE Springboard. In early 2026, he will be partnering with the British Library to design and lead an adult education course on the history of maps.

Jack’s doctoral work is supported at LSE by a PhD Studentship.

Research Topic:

Jack’s research at LSE is concerned with representations of the tropical world in British popular culture during the early-to-mid 19^th century, a period intimately associated with the rise of ‘high empire’. He is interested in how tropical motifs (including warmth, resplendent nature, disease, and cultural difference) entered common currency through print media, and how these motifs coalesced into a template on which to project imperial fantasies about commercial and civilisational progress. He is particularly interested in popular media sources, such as geography textbooks, school atlases, street literature, and illustrated magazines, which would have been widely accessible to children and working class Britons.

The significance of this topic lies in its ability to demonstrate how low-status print cultures had the capacity to assemble impressions of environmental difference into an interconnected architecture of place. In this way, Jack’s research underscores that imagined geographies were not merely decorative, but foundational to the development of the imperial psyche, shaping and justifying colonial ambitions by rendering the tropical world accessible to metropolitan audiences.

Project Title: 'Beneath Britannia’s Sun: Cultural Mappings of the Tropics in British Popular Print, 1815 to 1860'.

Supervisor: Dr Paul Stock

Expertise Details: Empire in the Long 19th Century, Mapping and Representation, Education and British Popular Culture, Print Cultures, Transnational Approaches

Upcoming British Library Course by Jack Englehardt

Jack Englehardt will be partnering with the British Library to deliver a new six-week adult education course on the history of maps and map-reading, running from 12 January to 16 February 2026. The course builds directly on the themes of Jack's doctoral project, which explores how nineteenth-century British popular culture in recast the tropics as a site of imaginative desire, giving spatial form to imperial discourses of progress, civilisation, and improvement.

Participants will be guided through a critical survey of cartography from the Middle Ages to the present, in which maps are reconceptualised as ideological instruments capable of organising worldviews, shaping perceptions, and embedding cultural assumptions as spatial fact. In weekly sessions, participants will explore a range of cartographic case studies, from medieval mappae mundi and Victorian social crusades to interwar transit schematics and the imaginative creations of contemporary literature and film. Each theme will be considered in relation to the broader question of how maps construct and contest the worlds we inhabit.

The course offers particular value to colleagues working in international history, imperial studies, geography, political thought, media history, and material cultures. It also provides rare access to the British Library’s world-renowned cartographic collections, including behind-the-scenes insights from Lead Curator of Antiquarian Mapping Tom Harper, and an expert lecture from LSE's own Dr. Paul Stock. Sessions take place online and require no prior specialist knowledge, making the course easily accessible for anyone interested in the intersections of space, representation, and power. Colleagues are warmly encouraged to attend or to share the opportunity with students who may find its themes especially relevant.

Link to sign up: https://events.bl.uk/events/online-history-of-maps-6-weeks