Zara Anishanslin
Associate Professor of History and Art History | University of Delaware
Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She works on early America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on material culture. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians. Her current project, Under the King’s Nose: Ex-Pat Patriots during the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, forthcoming) garnered her support as a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Barra Sabbatical Fellowship from the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department. She is currently on her second year as a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow in partnership with the Museum of the American Revolution, working to further innovations in doctoral training and seeking to build bridge between academia and the public humanities. According to her children, by far the most impressive thing on her CV is that she served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”
Susanna Blumenthal
William L. Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History | University of Minnesota
Susanna Blumenthal is a legal historian whose scholarship is broadly concerned with the problematics of personhood, focusing more particularly on conceptions of ability and disability and questions of identity, agency, and responsibility. At the University of Minnesota, she holds the William L. Prosser Professorship in Law and is also Professor of History and Co-Director of the Program in Law and History. She is author of the award-winning Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) and her work has appeared in Harvard Law Review, Law and History Review, and Law and Social Inquiry, among other journals. She holds a J.D. and a PhD in U.S. history from Yale University.
Maureen E. Brady
Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law | Harvard University
Maureen E. “Molly” Brady is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches property law and related subjects. Her scholarship uses historical analyses of property institutions and land use doctrines to explore broader theoretical questions. Her recent article, “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds,” won both the Association of American Law Schools’ Scholarly Papers Prize for junior faculty members in their first five years of law teaching and the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize for the year’s best paper by an early-career scholar. Professor Brady received an AB summa cum laude in history from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School, where she was the two-time recipient of the Parker Prize for legal history scholarship and was awarded the Quintin Johnstone Prize in Real Property Law, among other honors. Following graduation, she served as a clerk to Judge Bruce M. Selya on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and practiced at Ropes and Gray in Boston before joining the first class of the PhD in Law program at Yale University. Previously, Professor Brady taught at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she received multiple awards for teaching and research.
Joanna Cohen
Reader in American History | Queen Mary University of London
Dr Joanna Cohen is a Reader in American History at Queen Mary University of London. Her work explores the intersections of culture, capitalism, and community in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on material things. Her first book, Luxurious Citizens: Consumption and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America was published by Penn Press in 2017 and she has articles in the Journal of the Early Republic, the Journal of the Civil War Era, The Winterthur Portfolio and most recently The Journal of American History. She has been awarded fellowships at the McNeil Centre for Early American Studies, the Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library. In 2014 she was an AHRC/BBC3 New Generation Thinker. Awarded a year-long Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2022, she is currently working on a book that examines the emergence of the modern framework of relationships between property, law, and emotions in the nineteenth century. Entitled ‘Lost Properties: How Americans Learned to Feel for Things,” this project focuses on the terrible losses endured by New Yorkers in the wake of the Draft Riots of 1863 and asks what can their stories tell us about the way loss has shaped America’s political and emotional economy today?
Justene Hill Edwards
Associate Professor | University of Virginia
Justene Hill Edwards is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. Her research investigates slavery’s role in the long history of economic inequality in America, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Always highlighting the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, Hill Edwards studies the relationship between economic and political freedom for people of African descent in the United States. A 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a 2023 Mellon New Directions Fellow, her current book project, The Freedman’s Bank: An Untold Story of Triumph and Tragedy in Reconstruction America explores the rise and fall of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. In The Freedman’s Bank, Hill Edwards locates the bank’s failure within conversations about the racial wealth gap in America. She is also working on her third book, A Short History of Inequality, which will interrogate how inequality has pervaded and structured American life. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College, an M.A. from Florida International University, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Laura F. Edwards
Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty
Princeton University
Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty in the History Department at Princeton University. She focuses on the legal history of the nineteenth-century United States, with an emphasis on people’s interactions with law and the legal system. Her most recent book, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, combines material culture and legal history to reconstruct the economic world created by legal principles that allowed even people without rights to make legal claims to clothing, cloth, and related accessories. She is also author of four other books, most recently, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015) and The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). She has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation.
Elizabeth Ellis
Assistant Professor of History | Princeton University
Elizabeth Ellis is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history. Prior to joining Princeton, she was an assistant professor of History at New York University and director of NYU’s Native Studies forum. Her first book The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South, examined the formation of Native nations in the early southeast and the ways that Indigenous migration and immigration practices shaped and limited the extent of European colonization. Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements and is committed to organizing and fighting for Indigenous self-determination. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.
Bronwen Everill
Director of the Centre of African Studies | Cambridge University
Bronwen is the Director of the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge and is the author of Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition (2020) and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (2013). Her research interests are in the political economy of slavery and abolition in the US and West Africa in the nineteenth century.
Alexandra Finley
Assistant Professor of History | University of Pittsburgh
Alexandra Finley is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work focuses on the intersections of gender, race, and labor in early American history. She received her PhD from the College of William & Mary in 2017. Finley is the author of the monograph An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade, published in 2020 with UNC Press. She has also published the Journal of American History article “‘Cash to Corinna’: Domestic Labor and Sexual Economy in the ‘Fancy Trade'” and a chapter in the edited collection Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century.
Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor
Professor of History | University of California, Davis
Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, where she teaches courses on gender, American social and cultural history, and the histories of colonialism and capitalism. She is the author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (U Penn, 2009), co-author of Global Americans (Cengage 2017, second edition 2023), a college textbook on American history in global context, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History (OUP, 2018), in addition to multiple articles on gender and economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her America Under the Hammer, a history of auctioning and market culture in early America, is forthcoming at University of Pennsylvania Press. Recent public history projects include the EmpireSuffrageSyllabus and a collaboration with the National Park Service to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution with 65 biographies of women who lived in and around the parks. Hartigan-O’Connor has been an elected Trustee of the Business History Conference, is a Founding and Standing Editor of Oxford Bibliographies Online—Atlantic History, and a board member of Women and Social Movements. Since 2018, she has served as Associate Dean for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars at UC Davis.
Jacob Lee
Assistant Professor of History | Pennsylvania State University
Jacob Lee is Assistant Professor of History at Penn State University. He is the author of Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), which won the Jon Gjerde Prize from the Midwestern History Association and a Best of Illinois History Award from the Illinois State Historical Society. He has also published multiple articles and essays, most recently “‘Do You Go to New Orleans?’: The Louisiana Purchase, Federalism, and the Contingencies of Empire in the Early U.S. Republic,” which will appear in the June 2023 issue of Early American Studies. His current book project examines negotiations over legal jurisdiction between Cherokee Nation, Osage Nation, and the U.S. as a crucial battleground over sovereignty in nineteenth-century Indian Territory.
Julia Lewandoski
Assistant Professor | California State University, San Marcos
Julia Lewandoski is an assistant professor of history at California State University San Marcos. She is a historian of Indigenous early America, law, and cartography. Her book manuscript, Land Tenure Survival: Imperial Law and Indigenous Creativity in the Treaty Era, reveals how diverse Native nations colonized by France, Spain, and Mexico mobilized imperial legal regimes to defend land as property under United States and British Canadian rule after 1763. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in History and Digital Humanities at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in 2019 from the University of California, Berkeley, and her dissertation was awarded the manuscript prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society for Legal History, and the Social Sciences & Humanities Council of Canada.
Tiffany Nichols
Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow, History | Princeton University
Tiffany Nichols focuses on the intersection of the history of physics, astrophysics, and the environment. Nichols obtained a BS in Electrical Engineering and JD from the University of Virginia. After practicing law in the area of intellectual property, she competed a Ph.D. in History of Science at Harvard University. Nichols is now a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Program in History of Science. Her sponsor is Professor Angela Creager.
Emily Owens
David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History | Brown University
Emily Owens is the David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, where she does research on and teaches about US slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminisms. Her work broadly considers the ways that racism and misogyny get expressed in ordinary–and intimate–life. Her book, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) tells stories of enslaved women who were conscripted into brothels, concubinage, or the so-called “fancy trade,” to map the architecture of sexual violence in US slavery. Her writing can also be found in Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, differences, The Black Scholar, Literary Hub and Louisiana History.
K-Sue Park
Georgetown University
K-Sue Park’s scholarship examines the development of American property law and the creation of the American real estate market through the histories of colonization and enslavement. She teaches first-year Property and a seminar entitled Land, Dispossession, and Displacement. Previously, she was the Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA School of Law and an Equal Justice Works Fellow and staff attorney in El Paso, where she investigated predatory mortgage lending schemes as part of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s foreclosure defense team. Park earned her B.A. summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa honors from Cornell University, where she was a College Scholar, her M.Phil with Distinction in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was a Presidential Scholar, and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, where she was a Javits Fellow. Her publications have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, The University of Chicago Law Review, The History of the Present, Law & Social Inquiry, and the New York Times.
Dylan Penningroth
Professor of Law and Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, Morrison Professor of American History, Affiliated Research Professor, American Bar Foundation | University of California, Berkeley
Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Family History. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians’ Huggins-Quarles committee, a Weinberg College Teaching Award (Northwestern University), a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (Northwestern), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
Before joining Berkeley Law in 2015, Dylan Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015).
Penningroth is currently working on a book entitled Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights. Combining legal and social history, the study explores the practical meaning of legal rights for black life from the 1830s to the 1970s. It will be published by Liveright in fall 2023.
Kate Smith
Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century History | University of Birmingham
Kate Smith is an historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and empire. She researches how historical actors produced, consumed, and derived meaning from, the material world. Kate is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Lost Property: A Cultural and Social History of Possession, 1690-1830, which explores how people conceived of property and possession in their everyday lives. Kate’s recent books include, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 (2014), New Pathways to Public Histories (co-edited with Margot Finn, 2015), The East India Company at Home 1757-1857 (co-edited with Margot Finn, 2018) and British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940 (co-edited with Rosie Dias, 2018). Kate’s research has been supported by the AHRC, Chipstone Foundation, Past & Present Society, Paul Mellon Centre, UCL’s Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects, and the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate.
Felicity Turner
Associate Professor of History | Georgia Southern University
A legal historian and an historian of healthcare, Felicity Turner is an Associate Professor of U.S. History at Georgia Southern University. Her research has been supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, Bloomington; the University of Wisconsin Law School; and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Published in 2022, her first book, Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America, drew from inquests, court cases, newspapers, and medical literature about infanticide and infant death from across the nation to trace how claims to knowledge about the female body transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. In mapping out those changes, the book examines how knowledge—on a broader scale—became gendered, racialized, and commodified.
Peter Wirzbicki
Assistant Professor of History | Princeton University
Peter Wirzbicki is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. He is an intellectual historian of Nineteenth-Century United States. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between American intellectual life, political movements, and cultural expression. Wirzbicki’s first book, Higher Laws: Black and White Transcendentalists and the Fight Against Slavery examines how Transcendentalist ideas influenced the political strategies, ideologies, and struggles of the abolitionist movement. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the intellectual history of Reconstruction. It examines political philosophy during the remaking of the Union.