Staff

Managers

Philip Gooding

Philip Gooding is a former Postdoctoral Fellow. He is now a Project Manager at the Centre. For more information on Philip, see here.

Sofia O’Reilly

Sofia O’Reilly initially got involved with the IOWC through the publication of her paper Reproductive Resistance: Abortion, Infanticide, and Agency Among Enslaved Women in Madagascar and the Mascarenes, 17th to 19th Century in the working paper series. Since then, she has worked as a research assistant researching, transcribing, and translating archives from 19th-century Madagascar and the Mascarenes. She now serves as a Project Manager alongside Philip Gooding.

Research Assistants

Charles Edouard-Bistodeau

Debanjan Das

Debanjan Das is currently pursuing his Master’s in History at McGill, with his thesis studying sexual knowledge production in the British Empire. At the IOWC, he is working on collecting data on the 1876-1878 El-Nino event and famines in South Asia, from contemporary newspapers. He is also involved in cataloguing the textual, visual and cartographic holdings of the IOWC.

Jasmine Chen

Julia Smith

Julia Smith is a graduate student focusing on the intersection of myth and politics in ocean conservation. She joined the IOWC in 2026 as an editorial assistant completing bibliography work.

Roland Ndiadia

Roland Ndiadia is a PhD candidate in History at McGill University. He joined the IOWC in 2026 as a Research Assistant. He is working on human-environment interactions in Indochina from 1750 to the present day.