Past Seminars

Sarah Barringer Gordon is Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is well known for her work on religion in American…

Hayley Negrin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago specializing in Indigenous and early American history. Her book manuscript in progress “Fugitive Lands: Sovereignty and Slavery…

Simon Middleton’s specialization is early American social history and political economy. He earned his PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1998. He taught at the University of East Anglia and the…

Lindsay Keiter is an assistant professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona campus. Her current research focuses on the economic functions of marriage in the late eighteenth through early…

Derek Litvak is a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, where he works at the intersections of African-American, constitutional, and intellectual histories. His current project,…

Elaine LaFay is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is a historian of climate and the body, specializing in the nineteenth century United States. Her current research seeks to…

SJ Zhang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Professor Zhang’s current project, Going Maroon and Other Forms of Family, considers how reproduction and carceral forces shaped the decisions…

Whitney Martinko is an associate professor of History at Villanova University and the author of Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States (Early American Studies…

Carolyn Eastman is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the new book review editor for the William and Mary Quarterly. Her research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of early…

Tara A. Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa and a Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center. Her new book, Reading Pleasures (University of Illinois Press…