Arianne Sedef Urus

Assistant Professor of History

Arianne Sedef Urus is a historian of empire, law, and the environment in the early modern Atlantic World. Her research examines the connections between geopolitics, capitalism, and the non-human world. She is currently working on a book, Common Shores: A Political Ecology of the Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland Cod Fisheries (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press), about interimperial resource management regimes and Franco-British competition over the Newfoundland cod fisheries in the eighteenth century. This study of the Newfoundland fishery shows a different model of empire-building in the Atlantic World to that which historians have previously identified, premised on the strategic sharing of natural resources rather than exclusive possession of them. Moreover, this model was not one crafted purely at the imperial center, but rather was the product of interactions from top to bottom, across cultures, across national imperial regimes, and across oceans. Articles based on this research have appeared in Environmental History and in Law and History Review.

Urus's latest research project, Ottoman Florida, looks at the failed eighteenth-century British colony of New Smyrna in East Florida to explore how questions of environmental justice between British, Spanish, Ottoman, and Muscogee Creek inhabitants intersected with ideas about climate and wider interimperial geopolitics. She teaches Atlantic, early American, early modern European, legal, and environmental history.

Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Urus was Assistant Professor of Early American History at Cambridge, where she was a fellow of Christ’s College, and the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn.