Jocelyn Zimmerman
PhD Candidate
Interests: Eighteenth-century British empire; South Asia and the Himalayas; feminist, queer,
and decolonial methods and approaches; gender, sexuality, and kinship.
Entitled “George Bogle’s ‘Fairy Dreams’: Polygamy and the East India Company’s ‘Discovery’
Mission to Tibet,” my doctoral dissertation uses the 1774 East India Company’s ‘discovery’
mission to Tibet, commissioned by Governor-General Warren Hastings and led by Scottish
emissary George Bogle, as an entry point for exploring the centrality of polygamy
and fantasy in the forging of British colonial logics. I explore the interconnections
between various elements of the colonial ‘discovery mission’—botanical collection
and knowledge production, Scottish Enlightenment interest in the supernatural, Company
men’s non-monogamous miscegenation abroad, Enlightenment interest in ‘polygamous peoples,’
and an interest in ‘foreign’ medicine—to reveal how ideas about British supremacy
were very much manufactured at the intersection of the real and imagined, where both
‘real’ and ‘imagined’ are umbrella terms representing a multitude of shifting and
contingent possibilities. I draw upon decolonial, queer, and feminist methods to illuminate
the realities hidden behind colonial texts and how, in hiding certain realities, colonial
logics emerge as uncertain and rife with tension.
My previous research and writing projects have investigated how British women accused
of
adultery drew upon an enlightenment-era discourses of progress and civility to exonerate
themselves and accuse their male partners. I have also explored the metamorphosis
of the
concept of ‘virtue’ in British Ladies’ Magazines for its forging of a specifically
racialized feminine
ethic and discourse in the eighteenth-century metropole. Finally, my masters’ project
also
examined how the British bastardization of the term ‘nawab’ (the moniker ‘nabob’)
functioned
in late eighteenth-century periodicals to shift how Scots at home made sense (and
use) of the
newfound wealth of Scots returning from abroad.
My future research interests include demonology and the allegorical use of and belief
in the
supernatural in eighteenth-century imperial settings, queer identities and belonging
in the East
India Company, and the rise in bigamy among men and single living among women in
eighteenth-century Scotland.
Office: SBS S-314
Email: jocelyn.zimmerman@stonybrook.edu
Advisor:Kathleen Wilson