DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Modern European History: Britain and Its Empire

Thematic Field(s):  Economic and Labor History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Media history, business history

Biography

Holly E.D. Swenson is a historian of modern Britain and the British empire, with particular interests in media and business history. Her research explores how the export of British media shaped cultural life and political economy on a transnational scale in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, "Cultural Commerce: How Media Exports Made the British World in Australia, 1850-1990," argues that British cultural products became popular in Australia neither as a cultural inevitability nor due to imperial ideology but because of the path dependent effects of commercial strategy—of the decisions made between British entrepreneurs and Australian intermediaries, and their impact on the opinions of Australian consumers. Her dissertation won Northwestern History Department's T.W. Heyck Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research in British History. Her research has been published in Enterprise & Society and Modern British History, where her article won the 2023 Duncan Tanner Prize for outstanding scholarship by a postgraduate student. She completed her MPhil in Modern British History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and her BA with Honors in History from Stanford University. She is currently developing an article on British book export during the Second World War, will be teaching Modern Global History in the Winter with Northwestern's SPS, and will teach a course on modern business failures in the Spring Quarter.