Jasper Heeks is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at King’s researching overseas reactions to deviant and delinquent Australian ‘larrikin’ youth, 1870-1940. His supervisors are Dr Simon Sleight and Professor Carl Bridge.

First acknowledged in Melbourne in 1870, larrikins outraged respectable bourgeois society with their behaviour, clothing and language. Their activities generated intense and sustained social commentary and the term was quickly adopted across the continent.

The discourse stimulated was far from exclusive to Australia, and Jasper’s research follows the flows of information and people that took coverage of larrikins across the world. The project examines the connections between places and communities, how larrikins figured in transoceanic discussions of street gangs, education, modernity and empire, and the influence of the traditionally conceived colonial ‘periphery’ on the imperial ‘core’.

Jasper’s wider research interests include cultural studies, urban life, space, gender, histories of childhood and youth, transnational and global history, and digital humanities.

He has co-authored a chapter with Dr Simon Sleight on ‘Urbanisation: Youth Gangs and Street Cultures’ in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on the History of Youth Culture.