Past Presenters at the Ohio Seminar

2023-2024

Jessica Lepler, University of New Hampshire
"The Rain" from her book-in-progress “Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolution”

Brian Schoen, Ohio University
"Domesticating Empire: The Logic, Cost, and Limits of Federal Authority." 

Jazma Sutton, Miami University
“'God Bless Indiana and the Quakers:' Black Women and Quaker-Sponsored Expeditions to East Central Indiana”

Michael Blaakman, Princeton Univ.
“Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic”

Brett Rushforth, Univ. of Oregon
“Consuming Colonialism in the Sixteenth-Century French Atlantic.”

Andy Schocket, Bowling Green State University
“Who Counted in Early America? The Enumeration Act of 1790, in Four Scenes.”

Alejandra Dubcovsky, UC Riverside),
"Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South"


2018-2019

Cole Jones, Purdue University 
"The Politics of Retribution:  Congressional Nullification of the Convention of Saratoga, 1777-1778."

Noeleen McIlvenna, Wright State
“America’s First Republicans: Fendall’s Rebellion of 1660.”
 
Ronald J. and Mary Saacino Zboray, University of Pittsburgh 
"Performing Disabled Veterancy: The 'Armless Sailor,' Street Vending, and Politics, 1866-1869" 
 
John Blanton, City College (CUNY) 
"First Enslavements and First Emancipations: Property and Personhood in 1619"  
 
Adam Thomas, OSU-PSPP Post-Doctoral Scholar
"'I do not know what they call duty': The Politics of Necessity in the 1831 Emancipation Wars"
 
Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, University of Toledo 
"Mary Willing Byrd and the Era of the American Revolution."
 

2017-2018

Staunton Lynd, Attorney, Independent Scholar
"Unresolved Issues in 'People's History"
 
Jason Phillips, University of West Virginia
"John Brown's Pikes: Assembling the Future in Antebellum America"
 
Robert Parkinson, Binghamton University:
"Making 'the cause' common: Race and Nation in the American Revolution"
 
Christina Snyder, Penn State University:
"Slavery after the Civil War: The Slow Death and Many Afterlives of Bondage"
 
Mini-Conference: The Fiscal-Military State Under Fire: Rethinking Military State Formation, 1713-1775
 
Sarah Kinkel, Ohio University
"The Royal Navy and Imperial State-Building in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic"
 
William P. Tatum III,  Dutchess County (N.Y.) Historian
"'Within the Narrow Limits of a German Government:' The Legal-Military State in the British Empire, 1713-1775"
 

2016-2017

Gina M. Martino, University of Akron
“Among the Vanguard: Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast.” 

David N. Gellman, DePauw University
“Mixed Legacies: William Jay Confronts Slavery, Racism, and Democracy.”

Julie A. Mujic, Capital University
“Dissent as Patriotism: Indiana University and the American Civil War on Campus”

Stephen A. Warren, University of Iowa
“Ethnographically-Informed History and the Rediscovery of the Early American Midwest.”

Kevin Waite, Durham University (UK)
“The Southern Dream of a Pacific Empire.”


2015-2016

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Miami University
"The Political Economy of Guns and Textiles, 1798-1808.”

Michael McDonnell, The University of Sydney
"Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America"

Nancy Hewitt, Rutgers University
"Amy Kirby Post and the (American) Revolutions of 1847-1848"

Michael Crowder, CUNY Graduate Center
“The ‘Havanna,’ Horses, and Slaves: How the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Fought the Foreign Slave Trade, 1788-1807"

Carla Pestana, UCLA
"Authority in the early English Atlantic, or The Trials and Tribulations of Edward Doyley"

Sally Hadden, Western Michigan University
"The Last British Justice in Colonial America: Charleston's Board of Police, 1781-1782”


2014-2015

Jonathan DeCoster, Otterbein University
"Conquered by Indians: Spanish Precedent and the Early Colonization of North America."

Ariel Ron, Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions
"High Farming in a Democratic Republic: The Limits of Patrician Agricultural Reform, 1785-1825."

Lori Daggar, University of Pennsylvania
"Resurrecting the ‘chain of friendship’: The International Politics of Intercultural Diplomacy."

Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University
"Liberal Imperialism v. Imperial Liberalism: Thomas Law and the Dilemmas of Empire in British India and the Early American Republic."


2013-2014

Wendy Warren, Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University
"New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization at the Edge of an Empire"

Alisa Wade Harrison, Doctoral Candidate, City University of New York
"Commencing [Women] of Business: The Properties of Upper-Class Female Market Participation in Early National New York City"

Matt Spooner, Doctoral Candidate in History, Columbia University
"The Spoils of War: Debt, Slaves, and Social Change in the Revolutionary South"

Erika Gasser, Assistant Professor of History, University of Cincinnati
"The Problem of Manhood in Anglo-American Demonic Possession and Witchcraft."
*This talk, co-sponsored with Ohio State's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Workshop, will be held on Friday, 2-3:30, Dulles 168

"Liberation or Predation? British Assaults on Eighteenth-Century Spanish America"
Peter Silver, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University

"Female Liberty: Sentiment and Scandal in the Age of Revolutions"
Sarah Knott, Associate Professor of History, Indiana University


2012-2013

Margo M. Lambert, University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash College
"Francis Daniel Pastorius as a Cultural Broker: Early Meetings of German and English Colonists "

Heather Miyano Kopelson, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
"Archiving Race and Making Place in Early Eighteenth-Century Bermuda and New England"


2011-2012

Mary Kelley, University of Michigan
"'While Pen, Ink & Paper Can Be Had': Reading and Writing in a Time of Revolution"

Kevin Barksdale, Marshall University
"New Orleans Burning: Reimagining the Postrevolutionary Trans-Appalachian Borderlands, 1784-1789"

Shirley L Green, Bowling Green State University
"Freeborn Men of Color: The Franck Brothers in Revolutionary North America

Katherine Arner, Johns Hopkins, CHR Dissertation Fellow
"Fever, Commerce and Diplomacy: Consuls and the Transformation of Disease Control in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions"


2010-2011

Jonathan Eacott, Fellow, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
"A Company to Fear: The India Trade and the American Revolution"

John Coombs, Hampden-Sydney College
"Rethinking the Rise of Virginia Slavery"


2009-2010

Ronald P. Formisano, William T. Bryan Chair of American History, University of Kentucky
"American Political History, Parties and Populism: Retrospect and Prospect"

Nicholas Guyatt, University of York, UK; Stanford University, 2009-2010
"America's Conservatory: Race, Reconstruction and the Santo Domingo debate."

Jessica C. Roney, Ohio University
"The Original Community Organizers: Colonial Philadelphia Volunteers and the Delineation of Civic Space, 1725-1775"


2008-2009

Fred Woods, Brigham Young University
"Between The Borders: Mormon Transmigration Through Missouri (1838-1868)"

Rachel Cleves, Northern Illinois University
"Growing Up Anti-Jacobin: The Federalist-Abolitionist Connection Reconsidered"

Jack Rakove, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

"The Nexus Between Politics and Political Ideas: Jack Rakove on Writing the History of the Early American Republic"


2007-2008

Andrew Schocket, Bowling Green State University
"Revolutionary Studies: New Approaches to the American Revolution"

Margaret Sumner, Ohio State University, Marion Campus
"Object of Interest": College Families and Their Construction Principle, 1820-1850

Brian Schoen, Ohio University
"Protecting Slavery and Free Trade: The Political Economy of Cotton."


2006-2007

James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
"Democracy in Europe and America: A Conversation with Jim Kloppenberg on Alexis de Tocqueville"

Tom Ingersoll, The Ohio State University-Lima
"'A Day of Strict Reckoning: Loyalism in Revolutionary New England."

Nicole Etcheson, Ball State University
"Wives and Sweethearts: The Women of Putnam County, Indiana during the Civil War."

Tamara Thornton, SUNY Buffalo
A "Great Machine" or a "Beast of Prey": A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in an Age of Capitalist Transformation

Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University
"Lady Frances Berkeley, Nathaniel Bacon, and the Politics of Gendered Power in Seventeenth Century Virginia"


2005-2006

Timothy H. Breen, Department of History, Northwestern University
"America's Insurgency: Reflections on Popular Mobilization during the American Revolution."

Kate Haulman, Department of History, Ohio State University
"Social and Imperial Fabrics"

Julie Sievers, Department of English, Denison University
"Monsters, Angels, and Balls of Fire: Writing New England for the New Science"

Patrick Griffin, Department of History, Ohio University  
"Drawing the Line: The Ideology of British Empire in the American West."

Terri Snyder, Department of History, California State University, Fullerton
"Stories of Suicide in Eighteenth-Century Virginia: Masters, Slaves, and Print Culture During the Imperial Crisis"


2004-2005

Gordon Wood, Department of History, Brown University
"The Law and an Independent Judiciary," a chapter from his work in progress tentatively entitled The Empire of Liberty, which will be the Oxford History of the Early Republic.

Walter Rucker, Department of African and African-American Studies and Department of History, Ohio State University
"'Only draw in your countrymen': Atlantic Creoles, Akan Rebels, & Intentional Communities in Colonial New York City."

Drew Cayton, Miami University and Fred Anderson, University of Colorado
A panel discussion: "The Meaning of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America."


2003-2004

Steven Bullock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
"The Rages of Governor Francis Nicholson: Anger, Politeness, and Politics in Provincial America"

James Allegro, Department of History, Case-Western Reserve University
"Negotiating the Law: Slavery, Statute Law, and the Dynamics of Inter-racial Sex and Marriage in Massachusetts Bay"

Michael Les Benedict, Professor of History, The Ohio State University
"Popular Constitutionalism in the Era of Reconstruction"

Leslie Alexander, Assistant Professor of History, The Ohio State University
'To Leave the House of Bondage:' The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on African American Emigration in the Age of Emancipation."

Randolph Roth, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University
"The Decline in Homicide in Colonial America, 1675-1765."


2002-2003

Peter Way, Bowling Green University
"Class and the Common Soldier in the Seven Years' War"

Sarah Fatherley, Otterbein College
"The Sweet Recourse of Reason: Women's Education and Elite Identity in Colonial Philadelphia"

Elizabeth Mancke, University of Akron
"Power, Space, and the Making of Early Modern Empires"

Barbara Groseclose, The Ohio State University
"The 'Turkish Robe' and Early American Portraiture"


2001-2002

Shirley Wajda
"'This museum of the human race': Fowler and Wells' Phrenological Cabinet and American National Character"

Wayne Durrill
"Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society, Science, and the Politics of Academic Reputation in the Early Republic"

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy
"Metis Families in the 19th century Midwest: Responding to Colonization"


2000-2001

Mitchell Snay, History, Denison University
"Land and Nationality: Fenians, African-Americans, and Southern Whites in the Era of Reconstruction"

Jared Gardner, English, Ohio State
"Early American Periodicals and the Unsettling of American Literature"

Ann M. Little, History, University of Dayton
"Amongst ye French . . . She would be Ruin'd': English Families and the Catholic Menace"