Faculty Profile: Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Jennifer M. Regan-Lefebvre
Professor of History
Phone: (860) 297-2427	Office Location: Seabury Hall T-125
Send e-mail to Jennifer M. Regan-Lefebvre
Trinity College faculty member since 2013

Degrees:

Ph.D., Queen's Univ. Belfast
M.A., Queen's Univ. Belfast
B.S., Georgetown Univ.

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is the chair of the Department of History and a historian of modern Britain, Ireland, and British imperialism. She is the author of Imperial Wine: The British Empire and the Making of Wine's New World (University of California Press, April 2022), which won the André Simon Award. Her work combines political, economic, and cultural approaches, and puts wine history in dialogue with colonial history. She is currently co-editing the six-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Wine, with Charles Ludington. She is President of the Northeast Conference of British Studies.

Regan-Lefebvre's earlier work investigated the experience of the Irish in the British Empire, and particularly the intersections of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Her first book was a biography of the Irish Quaker nationalist, and president of the 1894 Indian National Congress, Alfred Webb. Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire revealed a strain of Irish nationalism that was globally-minded, civic, and committed to imperial reform. She also edited and published the memoirs of J. F. X. O'Brien, revealing his radical engagements in France, New Orleans, and Nicaragua before his entry into Fenian politics.

Regan-Lefebvre teaches widely across British and world history and enjoys developing new classes to stimulate students' interest in the past and to build their skills as historians and communicators. Her classes include an introductory British history survey, seminars on British cultural history, wine history, Irish history, and historical networks, and an experiential course in parliamentary debate. She has been particularly proud to supervise a number of senior thesis writers in undertaking archival research in the UK. Her former Trinity research students have gone on to pursue graduate degrees in history at Cambridge, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon.

Regan-Lefebvre has also written for Decanter and VinePair, and worked as a historical consultant for heritage and wine organizations. She teaches a free, open, online course on the history of wine, available through Trinity EdX. For her scholarship and educational impact, Regan-Lefebvre was named one of the "Future 50" of the global wine industry by the Wine and Spirits Education Trust and the International Wine and Spirits Competition in 2019. She holds a WSET Level 3 Award in Wine.

jrlhistorian.com

Books:

Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine's New World. University of California Press, April 2022. 340pp, ISBN 9780520343689. Paperback April 2024, Chinese edition May 2024. Winner of the André Simon Award.
Editor, For the Liberty of Ireland at Home and Abroad: the Autobiography of J .F. X. O’Brien. Classics in Irish History Series, University College Dublin Press, September 2010. 167pp, ISBN 978-1-904558-99-6.
Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb. Monograph for the Cambridge Imperial and Post-colonial Studies Series, Palgrave Macmillan, August 2009. 229pp, ISBN 978-0-230-22085-0.

Articles and Chapters:

‘Should Wine History Have a Post-colonial Future? British Imperial Viticulture and Settler Colonialism,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, Vol. 33, No. 2, December 2023, pp 37-57.
‘From Colonial Wine to New World: British Wine Drinking, c.1900–1990,’ Global Food History, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2, January 2019, pp 67-83.
‘John Bull’s Other Vineyard: Selling Australian Wine in Nineteenth-Century Britain.’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 45, No. 2, April 2017, pp 259-283.
‘Imperial Politics and the London Irish,’ Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion. Edited by Timothy McMahon, Paul Townend and Michael de Nie. Cambridge Imperial and Post-colonial Studies Series, Palgrave Macmillan, April 2017.
‘The Webb Family and Quaker Printing,’ The Oxford History of the Irish Book. Edited by James Murphy. Oxford University Press, October 2011, pp 122-8. ISBN 978-0-19-818731-8.
Jennifer M. Regan. ‘“We could be of service to other suffering people”: Representations of India in the Irish Nationalist Press, 1857-1887.’ Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2008, pp 61-77.

Select Invited Talks and Presentations:

2021

“Qu’est-ce que l’histoire du vin? Projets, débats, et methodologies,” invited talk to postgraduate programme in History, Université d’Angers.
“British Imperial Viticulture and Settler Colonialism: Should Wine History Have a Postcolonial Future?” Settler Vines: Making and Consuming Wine in a Globalizing World since 1850, York University, Canada. (virtual)
“Did Ireland Eat the Empire? Irish Food Under the Union,” Britain and the World Conference, Southampton, UK. (virtual)

2019

“Fortifying the Market: South African Wine and the Interwar British Consumer.” Conference paper. Northeast Conference of British Studies. Montréal, Canada.

2018

“Quelles réseaux pour quel monde du vin? L’Afrique du Sud et le commerce mondial du vin, de 1900 à 1961.” Wine Worlds, Networks and Scales. Université Bordeaux-Montaigne, Bordeaux, France.