Assistant Professor

Full CV

Britain Hopkins is a geographer and scholar of U.S. political history. She received her DPhil in Geography as a Clarendon Scholar from the University of Oxford, in 2021.

Her current book project examines the origins of student loan debt in the U.S. between 1958 and 1973. Drawing on research at national and private archives, this work illuminates the federal-private partnerships which shaped the student loan industry at its inception. It likewise foregrounds how student loans have been used as a racializing and gendered technology to push back against the Civil Rights and feminist movements by tethering access to higher education to market incorporation. More broadly, this research speaks to her interests in tracing U.S. empire, its forms of governance, and modes of citizenship through its relationship with liberal political economy and process of financialization. To this effect, she has published articles in the Journal of American History, Cultural Politics, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Prior to Bilkent, Britain was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Wellesley College (2022-2024), where she convened courses drawing on her interdisciplinary approach to US governance. She previously held a lectureship at St John’s College, University of Oxford (2020-2021), where she taught topics from across the discipline of Human Geography.