Ed Beasley

Ed Beasley (Associate Professor) took his B.A. in Urban Studies and Planning from Thurgood Marshall College UCSD in 1985, and he stayed at UCSD for his M.A. (1989) and Ph.D. (1993) in Modern European History. He studies nineteenth-century England and the British Empire. He focuses on how Victorian writers and officials developed ever wider and more imperialistic ways of thinking in order to classify the overseas societies that they came into contact with. His first book, Empire as the Triumph of Theory: A Study of the Founders of the Colonial Society of 1868 (2004), surveyed a wide group of Victorians; his second, Mid-Victorian Imperialists: British Gentlemen and the Empire of the Mind (2005), looked in greater depth at certain key intellectual circles. His current book project examines Victorian ideas of race. Later, he plans a book on how the Victorians approached urban social problems at home and in the empire. In connection with one project or another, Beasley remains interested in Alexis de Tocqueville; in Darwinian thought and the Victorian scientific network; and in the last two centuries in the development of the libraries, the museums, the learned institutions, and the walkable neighborhoods of London (and of San Diego).