Dr Philippa Hellawell
- Roles
- Author
- Researcher
Head of Collections Research
About
Dr Philippa Hellawell is 17th- and 18th-century historian. She researches the history of Britain’s engagement with other parts of the world, which informs her specialisms in maritime and colonial history and the history of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
Research activity
At the National Archives, Philippa is the Project Lead for PASSAGE (Partnership for Atlantic Slavery Scholarship, Archiving and Global Exchange), funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. PASSAGE seeks to connect scholars and archival collections at The National Archives, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, and other archives in the UK and globally to create new knowledge of the maritime trade of enslaved Africans. The project combines archival research on the history of 18th-century slave ships, with an international research mobility programme that seeks to centre and support the research of scholars from West Africa and the Caribbean on the history of transatlantic slavery.
Philippa has conducted a broad range of research into the records of Royal African Company. She is interested in archival methodologies that de-centre European traders and is currently researching the role of African skill and knowledge on the British fortifications in West Africa. Through her research, she seeks to use these corporate records and the records of state critically to surface the histories of Indigenous People and enslaved African men, woman and children.
Philippa also has expertise in the history of science, technology and medicine, particularly the intersections of knowledge and empire-building. Before joining The National Archives in 2021, she was the Early Career Development Fellow in Early Modern Medicine at King’s College London, where she also received her PhD in 2017. She has worked as Teaching Fellow in the History of Science and Medicine and was awarded the Caird Senior Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum in 2017-8. She has also held short-term research fellowships at The Huntington and the Lewis Walpole Library.
Publications
- with Briony Widdis, ‘The Enslaved, the Fante, and the Governors: Rediscovering the Detached Papers of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa', Africa Bibliography, Research and Documentation (forthcoming, 2025)
- ‘Merchants’, in The Digital Encyclopaedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century (2022)
- ‘Royal Society', in The Digital Encyclopaedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century(2022)
- ‘“The best and most practical philosophers”: Seamen and the authority of experience in early modern science’, History of Science 58, no. 1 (2020), pp. 28-50
- ‘Systematizing the sea: Knowledge, power, and maritime sovereignty in late 17th-century science’, in The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain, ed. Richard Blakemore and James Davey (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2020)
- ‘Diving engines, submarine knowledge and "the wealth fetch’d out of the sea"’, Renaissance Studies 34, no. 1 (2020), pp. 78-94