Office Hours
By Appointment
Education
PhD, Princeton University
MA, Princeton University
BA, University of Virginia
About Me
Rupali Mishra received her PhD and MA from Princeton University (2010 and 2005, respectively) and her BA from the University of Virginia (2003). In 2013-2014 she was a Barbara Thom Fellow at the Huntington Library, and was a short-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2013. Her research interests include early modern England, early empire and expansion, and political culture. She began teaching in Auburn in fall 2010. She is a former holder of a Javits fellowship.
In her first book, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Harvard University Press, 2018), Mishra examines the Company as a political body, investigating both the internal life of the Company and its place in the wider English polity, including its relationship with crown, privy council and parliament. She is particularly interested in the nature of political engagement in the early modern period, and how the needs and requirements of early expansion challenged and transformed English political culture.
She is currently developing two projects related to early English expansion. One examines life in the early East India Company factories, exploring the difficulties of learning to live in overseas metropolitan centers faced by the small communities of English traders that conducted the East India Company’s trade abroad in the early seventeenth century. It reveals the material and cultural challenges that accompanied the developing East Indies trade. The second focuses on attempts by the Caroline regime to consolidate and coordinate English overseas activities in the 1630s. This project looks at the ways concerns about the correct use of power and authority in overseas contexts motivated attempts by the regime to regularize varied English overseas endeavors ranging from Munster, Massachusetts Bay, the Levant, and the East Indies.
At Auburn, she teaches both World History I and II, as well as a variety of courses on early modern Europe and England, including the 2000-level survey of early modern Europe, a 3000-level course on Elizabeth and her England, a 5000-level course on early modern England, 1485-1688, and graduate seminars on early modern England, early modern political culture, and early English expansion.
Mishra welcomes applications from potential graduate students interested in working in any aspect of early modern English history before the Restoration in 1660. Her previous MA students have worked on a variety of topics, including public discourse and political economy in the 1630s and 1640s, and correspondence and news culture in early Stuart England. Students wishing to work with Mishra at the graduate level are encouraged to contact her in advance of application.
Research Interests
early modern England, early empire and expansion
Publications
Books
A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. This book was a finalist for the 2019 Longman-History Today Book Award.
Articles
“Governance Beyond Shores,” in the Oxford Handbook on Travel, Identity, and Race in Early Modern England, 1550-1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
“Structures of Trade and Empire,” in the New Cambridge History of Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).
“Governing Over Distance: delegating trust and dealing with disorder in the Early East India Company trade.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2024): 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2024.2370638
“In the Company of Merchants: Edward Sherburne, the East India Company, and the transformation of Stuart political practices.” In Political and Religious Practice in the Early Modern British World, eds. William J. Bulman and Freddy C. Dominguez, 77-96. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
"Diplomacy at the Edge: Split interests in the Roe Embassy to the Mughal court." Journal of British Studies 53, no. 1 (January 2014): 1-24.