Jessi Gilchrist – Mary Le Messurier Award for the Study of History
Email: jessi.j.gilchrist@gmail.com
Programme: PhD, War Studies, King’s College London
Biography (IN ENGLISH): Jessi Gilchrist is in the final year of her PhD in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London where her thesis explores the colonial origins of border security.
Originally from rural Saskatchewan in the Canadian prairies, Jessi began her studies at Brandon University in 2014 where she completed a Bachelor of Arts (honours) with a major in history and a Bachelor of Music specializing in flute performance. As a musician, Jessi had the opportunity to perform in festivals across the country from Vancouver to Montreal. In 2018, she turned her focus to understanding global competition and imperial legacies when she entered the two-year MA history programme at the University of Western Ontario where her MA thesis “Global Governance and Imperial Entanglements: Cooperation, Conflict, and Catastrophe in Anglo-Italian Relations, 1922-1940” was generously funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Research Scholarship (Master’s programme). In 2020, she went on to work with Margaret MacMillan at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto on her second, Ontario Graduate Scholarship-funded MA project entitled “Reconsidering the Locarno System: Great Britain, Fascist Italy, and the Imperial Roots of the Postwar Global Order, 1922-1925.”
Since joining the Department of War Studies at King’s College London in 2022, Jessi’s research has examined the unprecedented militarisation of the border between British Egypt and Italian Libya in the early twentieth century. Her thesis uses this inter-imperial border as a point of departure to explore how the British and Italian empires attempted to govern; how ideology shaped imperial policy and practice towards colonial border security; and what the experience of this colonial border tells us about the role of international law in mediating, formalizing, and entrenching the imperial system within the twentieth-century global order. Her work argues that it was at the Egypt-Libya border that a range of legal frameworks and material infrastructures came together for the first time for the precise purpose of border security.
Jessi has pursued several other projects while working on her doctoral thesis. During her first year of the PhD programme, Jessi worked as an analyst in the Geopolitics and National Security Learning Program at the Canada School of Public Service where she specialised on files relating to extremism within the Canadian national security environment. She has also published several peer-reviewed articles, served as a doctoral fellow at the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy and the Society for Intelligence History, and served as an associate fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies at John’s Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy. In 2023, she founded the King’s Trauma-Centred Study Group and continues to coordinate monthly sessions, workshops, and public events that engage with the theme of trauma as both a research focus and a lived-experience of researchers.
Jessi is excited to continue to advance our understandings of colonial legacies while seeking out ways to make this work more sustainable for researchers as a 2025 CCSF scholar and the recipient of the Mary Le Messurier Award for the Study of History.
