Seminars

The McNeil Center sponsors a works-in-progress seminar series that meets approximately twice a month between September and May. The paper for each session circulated two-weeks in advance. Over two hundred people attend at least once a year, with an average attendance of 40 to 50 at meetings held at various sites in the Delaware Valley. While most of the regular attendees are graduate students and faculty from institutions in the Philadelphia area, participants come from as far afield as Long Island, New York City, Princeton, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington. All are welcome to attend the seminars, each of which is followed by a happy hour reception with catered refreshments. 

Attendees are asked to register in advance through the link found at each seminar’s event page. Registrants will be emailed the pre-circulated paper and, if they are joining remotely, the Zoom link. To receive regular notifications of the seminars, join our mailing list by emailing us at: mceas@sas.upenn.edu. 



Columbus’s Shovel: Mortuary Intelligence and the Discovery of Indigenous Sovereignty, 1492-1514

Seminar
Christopher Heaney, The Pennsylvania State University
Jan 24, 2025 at -

Christopher Heaney is an Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History at the Pennsylvania State University, where he trains students in the ethnohistory of science, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes,…



Locating the Lost in Sixteenth-Century La Florida

Seminar
Matthew Bahar, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Jan 31, 2025 at -

Matt Bahar is Associate Professor of History at Oberlin College. He received his PhD at the University of Oklahoma in 2012 and was an NEH Long-term Fellow at the Huntington Library in 2014-2015. His research and…



The Visible and Obscured Labor of Enslaved Elders on Virginia Plantations

Seminar
Daniel Livesay, Claremont McKenna College
Feb 27, 2025 at -

Daniel Livesay is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. His work analyzes issues of race, slavery, and family in the early-modern Atlantic World. His first book, Children of Uncertain Fortune:…



Empire from the Ground Up: Fortification and Government in English Newfoundland

Seminar
Hannah Kaemmer, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Mar 28, 2025 at -

Hannah Kaemmer is the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her research focuses on the built environments of empire and the intersection of science, environment, and architecture in…



Empire of the Senses: The Creole Sensorium in Georgian London

Seminar
Natalie Zacek, University of Manchester
Apr 10, 2025 at -

Natalie Zacek is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, where she has taught since she received her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University. Her first monograph, Settler Society in the…



Counterrevolution in Favor of Liberty: Abolishing Slavery in Loyalist Upper Canada

Seminar
Michael Blaakman, Princeton University
Apr 25, 2025 at -

Michael A. Blaakman is an associate professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. A scholar of the revolutionary and early national eras, he focuses on the histories of politics, political economy,…



Plantation, Mobility, and the Policing of Labor in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic

Seminar
Paul Musselwhite, Dartmouth College
May 1, 2025 at -

Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and political histories of settler colonial societies in the seventeenth century. He is the…