Brendon G. Floyd

Biography

Brendon G. Floyd is a Defense of POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) Research Partner Fellow at the University of Missouri, jointly supported by the History Department and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. In that role, he digs through the archival haystack to help the DPAA fulfill its mission: “to provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.” When he’s not chasing paper trails across time and oceans, he teaches one course each year.

A historian of Ireland and the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolution, Floyd’s work ranges from Irish and maritime history to history of the Americas and the Caribbean as he tracks radicals, sailors, soldiers, privateers, and the occasional pirate when the sources get interesting. His dissertation, “On Strange Tides: The United Irishmen, Conscription, and Liminal Spaces in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” is currently being revised into a book manuscript. The project examines the forced conscription of United Irishmen into the British Army and Navy during the 1798 Irish Rebellion and argues that the Atlantic’s in-between spaces—prisons, docklands, ship decks, and military depots—weren’t just backdrops, but engines that spread Irish radicalism throughout the globe, helping shape insurgent networks and reverberating into the 1798 mutinies in the British Channel and Mediterranean fleets.

In addition to his PhD in History from Mizzou, where he served as the Kinder Institute’s inaugural Haskell Monroe Fellow, Brendon holds a B.A. in History and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from Johnson State College, as well as an M.A. in History from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.