Dr Tom Smith

I'm a historian of US religion and US foreign relations, with a particular focus on Protestant missionaries and their relationship to US power. My book, Word across the Water, examines US empire in Hawai'i and the Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of missionaries, exploring the ways in which they used historical narratives to negotiate their position between the imperial and the local.

• Word across the Water: American Protestant Missionaries, Pacific Worlds, and the Making of Imperial Histories. Cornell University Press (2024). ISBN13: 9781501777448 | ISBN10: 1501777440