Lecture: Jessica Harland-Jacobs

Dr. Jessica Harland-Jacobs, associate professor of history at the University of Florida, will give lecture entitled “Merchants, Methodists, and Masons: Atlantic Networks in 18th-Century Georgia,” exploring the intersecting networks of Methodist authorities and churchgoers, commercial businessmen and freemasons from 18th-century Georgia in the Atlantic world. Her lecture is part of the Mellon-funded research cluster “The Global American South,” administered through the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts at UGA. Dr. Harland-Jacobs’s 2007 book, “Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717 – 1927,” was the first critical study of the relationship between freemasonry and British imperialism, covering two centuries and five continents. Her research, which several reviewers described as “magisterial,” traces how this relatively new social organization created a universal network that reinforced British values and objectives in vastly distant and different locales while considering overlapping issues of globalization, imperial power, supranational identity and masculinity. Presented in collaboration with the Lamar Dodd School of Art and supported by funds from the Mellon Foundation for the Global Georgia research cluster and from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.