Professor
Office: AL 572
Email: [email protected]
Website

Education

Ph.D. in History, University of California, San Diego (1993)

M.A. and C.Phil., University of California, San Diego (1989)

B.A., Thurgood Marshall College, University of California, San Diego (1985)

Professor Ed Beasley, FRHistS, studies Victorian England. His first two books looked at the backers of a pro-imperial pressure-group (Empire as the Triumph of Theory: A Study of the Founders of the Colonial Society of 1868, 2004), and how certain ways of thinking about politics and anthropology fed into British imperialism (Mid-Victorian Imperialists: British Gentlemen and the Empire of the Mind, 2005). His third book (The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, 2010), examined how the Victorians tried to divide the peoples of the world into categories in order to understand them better. Yet they sometimes fell into the trap of setting up racial stereotypes. The book explored the thinking of Alexis de Tocqueville, Walter Bagehot, and Charles Darwin, among others, at a time in the mid-nineteenth century when racist ideas were becoming more common in Great Britain. 

Next Beasley wrote The Chartist General: Charles James Napier, The Conquest of Sind, and Imperial Liberalism, 2016. It is a biography of a nineteenth-century military officer who supported the cause of social revolution within the British Isles and imperial expansion abroad. Napier ruled part of Greece and conquered what is now Southern Pakistan. He illustrates that still-prevalent mentality that attempts to enforce Western rule over Mediterranean or Islamic peoples in order to make them “free” from the rulers they had before. 

Beasley’s most recent book (A Male Hysteria: Diabetes and the Victorian Mind, 2024), explores nineteenth-century British ideas about diabetes. The book examines what could be known about the disease given the state of science at the time; the way diabetes came to be seen (mistakenly) as psychological in origin; and the effects of this view on the lives of patients. Beasley is now writing a book on how the size of the world was perceived in Victorian England through the different lenses of literature, social science, and the visual arts. 

Prof. Beasley enjoys teaching as much as research. The craft of history means looking at the rich record of human life and finding meaningful patterns and stories. It means examining how different people have tried to live in and understand the world. Beasley enjoys helping students through that process of searching for evidence and patterns, and then framing well-expressed arguments of their own.