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Kelly L. Watson
PhD
Author and researcher
Recent Published Work
“Mary Kittamaquund Brent, ‘The Pocahontas of Maryland:’ Diplomacy, Sex, and Power in the 17th century Chesapeake.”
Published in the Winter 2021 Issue of Early American Studies
“Cannibalism.” Oxford Bibliographies in "Atlantic History." Edited by Trevor Burnard. New York: Oxford University Press, 28 November 2018.
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0307.xml
“Sex and Cannibalism: The Politics of Carnal Relations between Europeans and American ‘Anthropophagites.’”
Essay featured in To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic edited by Rachel Herrmann. University of Arkansas Press, 2019.
Research in Progress
“The Colonial Scientist as Pied Piper: The Appetites of D. Carleton Gajdusek in Papua New Guinea.”
The Pied Piper of New Guinea: The Sexual and Scientific Appetites of D. Carleton Gajdusek.
“’Margaret Brent, Spinster:’ Marital Status, Catholic Identity, and Power in Colonial Maryland.”
Spinsters, and Bachelors: Opting Out of Sex in Early America
Selected Reviews of
Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World
Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 2017
"Its strengths lie most notably in its engagement with a broad range of primary sources, its attention to the resonance between inappropriate consumption practices and disordered gender norms, and its ‘north Atlantic’ remit, for which Watson rightly claims originality, and which will make this book a particularly useful teaching resource. As such, it constitutes a welcome contribution to the literature on the construction of the New World cannibal."
American Historical Review by Sharon Block, April 2016
"This chronologically and geographically wide-ranging book is an enjoyable and enlightening read. It brings together occasional commentaries to form a coherent viewpoint that highlights cannibalism’s connection to early modern European colonialism."
Journal of Jesuit Studies by Leslie Tuttle, 2016
"The greatest complaint that a reader is likely to have, however, is that Watson's comparative framework raises more interesting questions for research than a short book is able to answer."

Insatiable Appetites:
Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the
North Atlantic World
Early American Places Series
NYU Press
Available in Hardback & Paperback!
http://nyupress.org/books/9780814763476/
Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed.
In this unique, comparative history of cross-cultural encounters in the early north Atlantic world, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated.
In her close read of letters, travel accounts, artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibals and cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and she argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity. Original and historically grounded, Insatiable Appetites uses the discourse of cannibalism to uncover the ways in which difference is understood in the West.
BACK COVER REVIEWS
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"Insatiable Appetites is a well-crafted and fascinating book—an important read for students of race, gender, and sexuality in the early modern world. Readers won’t look at imperial discourses of 'civilization' and 'savagery' in quite the same way after consuming and digesting this wide-ranging history."
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Thomas A. Foster, DePaul University
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"Insatiable Appetites offers a thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis of cannibalism as a crucial ingredient of European imperialism during the early modern period. Watson finds references to cannibalism as a savage manifestation of disordered sex and gender in the accounts of Spanish, French, and English chroniclers across four centuries before it finally gives way to a new representation of cannibalistic men in the nineteenth century. Tracing the connections among cannibalism, savagery, and deviant sexual and gender practices, Watson provides a convincing account of how Europeans mobilized discourses about man-eating women and consumed men to distinguish themselves from the populations they wished to dominate."
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Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania
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"Kelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites is a compelling analysis of the relationship between tales of cannibalism and the gendered dimensions of Spanish, French, and English imperialism in the early modern North Atlantic. In the descriptions of cannibalism produced by explorers and conquistadores, missionaries and settlers, Watson shows us the interrelationship between the gender norms articulated in these tales and the justification of imperial domination over Indigenous men and women. By focusing on cannibalism, sex, and gender together this book is a useful contribution to our understanding of the relationship between discourse and power in the unfolding of empire."
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Carole Blackburn, The University of British Columbia
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