Welcoming Jim Ambuske to R2 Studios

We are excited to announce that Dr. Jim Ambuske has joined R2 Studios, the podcast division of RRCHNM. Jim is a historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World and has directed several digital history projects. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia in 2016.

Jim joins us from The Washington Library’s Center for Digital History at George Washington’s Mount Vernon where he designed and executed several digital research and public history projects. In addition to co-creating and co-writing the eight-part podcast docuseries Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, he also hosted and produced the podcast Conversations at the Washington Library. 

As the Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library, Jim co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project, which reconstructs and interprets the legal texts that Thomas Jefferson selected for the university’s original library, and the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project, a multi-institutional transatlantic effort to explore everyday life in early America and the British Atlantic world of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the printed records of Scotland’s supreme civil court.

A former Georgian Papers Programme Fellow, Jim spent a month in 2015 rummaging through the papers of King George III in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth II’s kind permission.

Jim’s own research focuses on the imperial politics of emigration from Scotland to North America in the era of the American Revolution, how Americans, Scots, and others used the law on both sides of the Atlantic to defend their interests in the aftermath of the War for Independence, and how digital technology can be used to reconstruct the past and recover voices often hidden in the archives. He is currently at work on a book tentatively titled, The Fury of Emigration: Scotland, the American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire.

We are excited to welcome Jim to the R2 Studios team, where he will work on the producing The Green Tunnel and an upcoming show that will explore the history of American antisemitism.