Cheryl Trauscht (History) is a 2026–27 HRI Graduate Fellow whose current research project is titled “Ubiquitous Stuff, Invisible People: Making Barrels, Knowledge, and Stories in the British Atlantic, 1620 to 1783.” She explores the work of coopers, whose now-disappeared barrels and other wooden casks reflect the relationship between artisanal knowledge and settler colonialism—and how race and gender came to supplant social status as the main agents of archival preservation or erasure.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
I research the symbiotic relationship between artisanal knowledge and settler colonialism in the early modern British Atlantic. My work focuses on coopers, those artisans who construct wooden containers such as barrels and buckets. Without coopers, British colonization would have been neither desirable nor possible, as the containers they made enabled the transportation of colonial commodities (sugar, rum, tobacco, flour, indigo, etc.) across the Atlantic. These artisans were ubiquitous throughout the British Atlantic, but their appearances in the archive range from many but brief to few and brief depending on the cooper’s race and gender. My research asks: how can we make legible these artisans’ contributions when 1.) the embodied nature of their knowledge base resists understanding through the written word and 2.) their identification with marginalized groups further erases the contributions of their knowledge and labor. Furthermore, how do the stories we tell about coopers and other artisans—in histories, at historic sites, etc.— reinforce racial and gender norms and perpetuate cycles of marginalization for artisans who fall outside of those norms?