Recent Publication: “Elections, Self-Government, and Settler-Colonial Rule in British North America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Revolutionary Elections in the Americas, 1800-1910, (2026): https://doi.org/10.1093/9780190265526.003.4.

Jarett Henderson is a historian of gender and sexuality, colonial North America (Canada), and British settler colonialism. He earned his Ph.D. from York University in Toronto and his MA and BA in History from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Before joining the History Department at UC Santa Barbara, he was an Associate Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, where he directed the History Honours program, organized an annual undergraduate research conference (the Foothills Colloquium), and taught courses on Canadian history, the British Empire, and Queer History.

His research explores how debates over colonial rule in the nineteenth-century British Empire were entangled with wider struggles over gender, sexuality, and un/freedom. Jarett is especially interested in how campaigns to abolish slavery, protect Indigenous peoples, and end convict transportation reshaped imperial understandings of freedom, colonial governance, and the boundaries of respectable settler society. He explores these themes and others in the forthcoming edited collection, Queering the Tensions of Empire, co-edited with T. J. Tallie and Kristen Thomas-McGill.

His book project, Unnatural Sex and Uncivil Subjects: A Queer History of Straight Settler State Making in Early Canada, explores how debates over white settler self-government and the criminalization of sex between men in the first half of the nineteenth century helped orient settler society toward straightness. By queering the assumption that heterosexuality was something settlers carried with them to North America, Jarett insists that the establishment of settler self-government in the Canadian colonies defined and policed the sexual boundaries of respectable settler manhood.

Jarett is committed to undergraduate mentorship and creating opportunities for students to do the work of historians beyond the traditional classroom. As Director of the UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History, he mentors students in historical research, writing, editing, and scholarly publishing. Through his Historical Skills course, developed in partnership with the History Associates and UCSB’s Public History Program, he connects students with hands-on projects in historical preservation, public outreach, and community engagement. In recognition of his commitment to undergraduate research, Jarett received the UCSB Chancellor’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentorship in 2023. Outside the classroom, Jarett still laces up weekly at Ice in Paradise in Goleta.

Undergraduate Level

  • HIST 9 – Historical Methods
  • HIST 17A – North America Before 1800
  • HIST 99 – Introduction to Research
  • HIST 101G – Comparative Contested Sexualities 
  • HIST 101QA – Queer North America 
  • HIST 101SR – Undergraduate Research Seminar in the History of Sexuality
  • HIST 124C – Sex, Gender, and Settler Colonialism
  • HIST 141C – The British Empire
  • HIST 141R – Undergraduate Research Seminar in Modern British History
  • HIST 194 AH/AB – History Honors Thesis Seminar
  • HIST 196JABC – Internship in Scholarly Publishing
  • HIST 196 HS – History Skills
  • HIST 199RA – Independent Research Assistant

Graduate Level

  • HIST 200G – Comparative Histories of Sex, Gender, and Colonialism
  • HIST 295GS – Gender and Sexuality Workshop 

Undergraduate Thesis Supervision

Public Facing Histories: