Photo by Michael Gill

 
Tillman Nechtman, PhD
Conference Speaker

Title of talk:  "Joshua Hill, the Self-Instituted King of Pitcairn Island:  Separating the Truth from the Lies"
Video of talk   Text of talk (PDF)


Dr. Tillman Nechtman was born in Wiesbaden, Germany and raised in Augusta, Georgia.  He attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, earning a Bachelor of Science of Foreign Service degree in 1997.  While a student at Georgetown, Professor Nechtman spent the 1996-1997 academic year as a student at the Universidad de Sevilla in Seville, Spain.  After graduating from Georgetown, Nechtman migrated to the West Coast, where he earned a Masters degree in domestic British history from the Claremont Graduate University in 1999.  In 2002, Nechtman received a second Masters degree, this one in British imperial history, from the University of Southern California.  Professor Nechtman earned his PhD in British imperial history from the University of Southern California in 2005.  He moved from the Los Angeles area to Saratoga Springs, New York in the fall of that same year to join the history department at Skidmore College.  Today he is an associate professor of British and British imperial history at Skidmore.

Dr. Nechtman's teaching and research interests focus on Britain and its empire.  His first book, entitled Nabobs:  Identify and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2010), investigated the cultural relationships between Britain and India in the eighteenth century.  He has published essays on other aspects of British imperial history in such journals as History Compass, The Journal of Women's History, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and The Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Currently Dr. Nechtman is writing a biography of Joshua Hill, the self-instituted "king of Pitcairn," in which he hopes not only to separate the truths of Hill's life from the lies he told about himself and, more significantly, about his authority at Pitcairn Island but also to situate Hill's fascination with Pitcairn against the broader backdrop of nineteenth-century British imperialism in the Pacific World.  Interested parties are invited to contact Dr. Nechtman at tnechtma@skidmore.edu.  Interested parties are invited to contact Dr. Nechtman at tnechtma@skidmore.edu.

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Last updated October 15, 2012