Dr Sara Caputo
College positions: Official Fellow, Director of Studies in History, Director of Studies in History and Modern Languages, Director of Studies in History and Politics
Subject: History
Dr Sara Caputo is Director of Studies in History, History and Politics, and History and Modern Languages (Part IA, IB, and II).
Dr Caputo’s general areas of interest are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transnational maritime history, British and European imperial history, the history of medicine, and the history of mapping. More specifically, her research focuses on maritime mobilities and exchange.
Her first book, entitled Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. It investigates the legal, social, cultural and diplomatic context of transnational 'encounters' and employment aboard British naval vessels, drawing on primary sources from British, Dutch, Italian, Maltese, and American archives, as well as further material from Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and Spain.
Her second book, entitled Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel, appeared in 2024 with Profile Books and The University of Chicago Press. It investigates the history of Western cartographical representations of maritime travel. For more background on the origins of this project, please see the Faculty of History website. The book has been translated into Italian and is forthcoming in Vietnamese.
Dr Caputo is currently writing up a third monograph, a comparative and transnational history of naval medicine in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, French, and Spanish Navies, including a perspective 'from below'.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She lectures and supervises on British, European, and World History in the Faculty of History, as well as the early modern history of science and medicine in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
Research Interests
- Transnational history
- Maritime and naval history
- History of migration
- ‘Long’ eighteenth century
- History of cartography
- History of language
- History of medicine
- Quantitative historical methodologies
Qualifications
- BA History (Hons), Cardiff University
- MSc History, The University of Edinburgh
- PhD History, University of Cambridge
Career/Research Highlights
- 2024 Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize
- Dr Sara Caputo wins string of awards
- 2018-19 Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London
- 2015-18 Lewis-AHRC Scholarship, University of Cambridge, Robinson College
- 2015-18 Honorary Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar, University of Cambridge
KEY PUBLICATIONS
Books
Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 2024, Cambridge University Press.
Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel, 2024, Profile Books and The University of Chicago Press.
Journal articles
“One of the Most Alarming Casualties to Which the Sailor Is Exposed”: British Naval Medicine, Embodied Knowledge, and the Experience of Lightning at Sea, 1750-1840, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, FirstView 2025.
From Surveying to Surveillance: Maritime Cartography and Naval (Self-)Tracking in the Long Nineteenth Century, Past & Present, 264:1 (2024), 84-118.
Human Tales on the Pathless Sea?: Imperial Subjectivities and Exploration Ship Tracks in European Maritime Mapping, c.1500-c.1800, The English Historical Review, 139:598-599 (2024), 770-800.
‘Trailblazers’ Wakes: Ship Tracks in Western Imperial Mapping, Imago Mundi, 75:2 (2023), 288-93.
Treating, Preventing, Feigning, Concealing: Sickness, Agency, and the Medical Culture of the British Naval Seaman at the End of the Long Eighteenth Century, Social History of Medicine, 35:3 (2022 [advance access December 2021]), 749-69.
Winner of the Fachverband Medizingeschichte e.V. wissenschaftlichen Förderpreis für herausragende medizinhistorische Arbeiten, 2022.
Winner of the Society for Military History Vandervort Prize, 2022.
Shortlisted for the Society for the Social History of Medicine Roy Porter Prize, 2018.
Mercenary Gentlemen? The Transnational Service of Foreign Quarterdeck Officers in the Royal Navy of the American and French Wars, 1775-1815, Historical Research, 94:266 (2021), 806-26.
Joint winner of the Institute of Historical Research Sir Julian Corbett Prize, 2020.
Exploration and Mortification: Fragile Infrastructures, Imperial Narratives, and the Self-Sufficiency of British Naval “Discovery” Vessels, 1760-1815, History of Science, 61:1 (2023 [OnlineFirst 2020]), 40-59.
Runner-up (third place), International Committee for the History of Technology Maurice Daumas Prize, 2021.
Alien Seamen in the British Navy, British Law, and the British State, c.1793 - c.1815, The Historical Journal, 62:3 (2019), 685-707.
Towards a Transnational History of the Eighteenth-Century British Navy / Vers une histoire transnationale de la marine britannique au XVIIIème siècle, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 397 – 'Perspectives Transnationales, 1780s-1820' (2019), 13-32.
Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793-1815, The Scottish Historical Review, 97:1 (2018), 85-118.
Chapters in edited volumes
Military Movements, in David Lambert and Callie Wilkinson (eds), A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility – Volume 3: A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility in the Age of Global Exploration and Empires (1450-1800) (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025).
“Contriving to Pick Up Some Sailors”: The Royal Navy and Foreign Manpower, 1815-1865, in Thomas Dodman and Aurélien Lignereux (eds), From the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire: Empire after the Emperor (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2023), 205-26.