University of Groningen

Faculty Member, American Studies

Assistant Professor

Faculty of Arts

About

My first book, "From Hudson to Penn," is in production at Louisiana State University Press and is slated to appear in spring 2013. 

The book is about the ways that ethnicity, national identity, and cosmopolitanism intersected in the Delaware Valley during the seventeenth century.  It's also about people: Henry Hudson, John Smith, Peter Minuit, Johan Printz, Peter Stuyvesant, William Penn, among many others.  It touches on New Sweden, New Netherland, New Haven, Maryland, Brazil, settler revolts, invasions, and Penn's debt to English imperialism.  It's written in academic prose, but I'd like to think that it's interesting and readable even if you don't have a Ph.D. in history (although it probably would help!). 

I'm thinking about a few new projects, too. 

The first is called "Land, Liberty, & Property: Surveyors and the Production of Empire in British North America." It's a cultural history of land surveyors that aims to show how surveyors constituted Britain's empire in North America through practices of measuring and representing the landscape. Drawing from historical, geographical, and literary approaches, it presents surveyors as key players in a settler-driven process that attached landowners first to their lands, markets, and local institutions, and only secondarily to the imperial authorities that oversaw them. "Creole" surveying practices adapted from European models ultimately gave settlers more, not less, control of their own properties and communities. But these practices also tied them closely to an empire that promised to protect their rights to land, liberty, and property. 

(I'm posting some of my thoughts about the project at http://compleat-surveyor.blogspot.com/)

My second research project is an account of a famous murder case in antebellum Natchez that turned on the racial classification of the murderer and his victims.  I'll be working closely on this research with Dr. Tiwanna M. Simpson, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Historic Africana.