Dr. Holly Brewer

Burke Chair of American Cultural and Intellectual History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland – College Park 

Project Director and Lead Editor

Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland  a specialist in early American history and the early British empire. Her work situates the origins and impact of political ideas in laws and practical policies across England and its American empire. Her first book traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across  the empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice: By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority won three national prizes including the 2008 Biennial Book Prize of the Order of the Coif from the American Association of Law Schools, the 2006 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association and the 2006 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History. She also won three prizes for her article “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia” (1997), including the 1998 Clifford Prize for the best article on any aspect of Eighteenth Century Studies and the 2000 Douglass Adair Memorial Award, for the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in the past six years. She is currently finishing a book that situates the origins of American slavery in the ideas and legal practices associated with the divine rights of kings, tentatively entitled “Inheritable Blood: Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire,’ for which she was awarded fellowships from the NEH, NHC in 2009, the Patrick Henry Fellowship from the Starr Center in 2012, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She published  “Slavery, Sovereignty and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery” in the American Historical Review (October 2017), which received both the 2019 Srinivas Aravamudan Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for an article published in the previous year that pushes the boundaries, geographical and conceptual, of eighteenth-century studies by using a transnational, comparative, or cosmopolitan approach as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Clifford Prize, American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.  Also see her “Slavery-Entangled Philosophy: Does Locke’s Entanglement with Slavery Undermine his Philosophy?” AEON, September 12, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/does-lockes-entanglement-with-slavery-undermine-his-philosophy.  Professor Brewer is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and co-editor of the American Society for Legal History’s book series as well as membership co-chair. In addition to the Guggenheim fellowship, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Huntington Library, among others.  She currently directs the History Honors program and is proud of her work protecting K-12 History Education in North Carolina in 2010, where she also served as state coordinator for the National Council for History Education.

Email: hbrewer@umd.edu

Lauren Michalak

Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Maryland – College Park

Graduate Assistant and Assistant Editor

Lauren Michalak is a Ph.D. Candidate in Early American History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation, “‘The Mobs All Cry’d Peace With America’: The Gordon Riots and Revolution in England and America,” examines Anglo-Atlantic revolutionary politics during the American Revolution by exploring the connections between the 1780 Gordon Riots in London and American Patriot and Loyalist ideology and rhetoric.  She gave a conference paper at the CUNY Early American Republic conference in 2017 based on her research for her dissertation chapter on American Patriot interpretation and use of the Gordon Riots, and wrote a review that was published on the British Society of Eighteenth Century Scholars’ Criticks website of the British radio program “In Our Times” episode on the Gordon Riots.  Lauren has worked on the Slavery, Law, and Power (SLAP) project since Fall 2016, and has been chiefly involved in obtaining, organizing, and transcribing materials for the project.  She was lead transcriptionist for the Barbados Slave Codes (1667), the Jamaica Slave Codes (1664), and Locke’s Virginia Plan (1702).  In addition to her work with the SLAP project, Lauren has been involved in the management of the Center for Global Migration Studies’ Archive of Immigrant Voices, run on the Omeka platform. Her work for the Archive includes the processing of oral histories files and forms, creation of metadata and tags for each oral history, and maintenance of the digital and physical archive.  In late-summer 2020 she will undertake a month-long fellowship at the Royal Archives’ Georgian Papers Programme to examine and help transcribe manuscripts related to King George III, the American Revolution, and the Gordon Riots.

Derek Litvak

Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Maryland – College Park

Graduate Assistant and Assistant Editor

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. candidate in Early American History at the University of Maryland. He graduated from Virginia Tech in 2016, with a degree in History, and a minor in Political Science. Derek’s research interests lie at the intersection of constitutional history, slavery, and race in Early America. His dissertation, tentatively titled The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States, examines the relationship between U.S. citizenship’s creation in the Constitution, and the institution of slavery. Drawing on legal records, political debates, and cultural texts, his dissertation argues citizenship, as it emerged in the U.S. Constitution, was not only an exclusionary status when considering Black Americans, but was also created to protect the institution of slavery. He has presented his research at several academic conferences, including the Society for Historians of the Early Republic and the American Society for Legal History. Derek has a commitment to public facing scholarship, and has written several articles, which have appeared in the Washington Post and History News Network, on topics ranging from citizenship, slavery, and U.S. policy. He also conducts podcast interviews with scholars as part of the New Books Network. And his work with the Slavery, Law, and Power (SLAP) project, is an outgrowth of his commitment to public scholarship.

Joana “Katie” Labor

Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Maryland – College Park

Graduate Assistant and Assistant Editor

Joanna Labor’s  dissertation examines the development of domestic privacy in colonial America through the lens of traveler accommodations. Her paper, “Denied! A Repudiation of Southern Hospitality in Colonial Virginia,” was accepted for presentation at the 2020 Omohundro Institute Annual Conference and the 2020 CUNY EARS Graduate Student conference. A recent addition to the Slavery, Law, and Power Project, Joanna brings several years of administrative and student5based experience to the project. From 2011 to 2014, Joanna worked as first the Project Coordinator for a NSF grant at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) then as the Manager for the Math Department. At Maryland, Joanna currently serves as the Academic Advisor for undergraduates in the history department and has worked as the event coordinator for the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies.

Jordan S. Sly

Ph.D. Student at the University of Maryland – College Park

Digital Humanities Consultant and Assistant Editor

Jordan is a PhD student studying Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern Atlantic world focusing on the intellectual and religious histories and entanglements of the mid-seventeenth century with particular emphasis on the English Civil Wars and their relationship to the colonial ventures in the Atlantic context. Additionally, Jordan is a Research and Instruction Librarian at the University of Maryland where he is the subject specialist for, among other areas, the Digital Humanities. Jordan has previously published on and presented his Digital Humanities project The Recusant Print Network Project, on which he was the sole researcher. Jordan is also an instructor with the University of Maryland’s iSchool teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses in the information and library fields. For more information, please see my personal website for publications, course info, and more.

Ji Kim

Digital Humanities Consultant

Ji Kim first connected with the Slavery, Law, & Power project as part of the University of Maryland’s undergraduate technology apprenticeship program. She is excited to support the team as a web developer. She is based in Washington, D.C. working as a writer and editor alongside digital humanities focused work in graphic design and web development

Hannah Nolan

Ph.D. Student at the University of Maryland – College Park

Graduate Assistant and Assistant Editor

Hannah Nolan is a PhD student studying Early American history at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses upon the role of collective memory – specifically those of revolt and revolution – in the creation of national and ethnic identities throughout the Early American Republic. Her dissertation will examine the transatlantic memories of the United Irishmen and their usage as political and ethnic organizing tools within the United States.

Matthias Fischer

Research Associate and Assistant Editor

Matthias Fischer is a historian of comparative slavery, race, and religion in colonial America and the Anglo-American Atlantic World. Dr. Fischer completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 2020. His dissertation, “A New Race of Christians: Slavery and the Cultural Politics of Conversion in the Atlantic World” examines the impact of religious beliefs on the development of ideas that justified and sustained slavery and racial hierarchies. He is also interested in early modern political thought and broader debates about justice, empire, and colonial rule from the late sixteenth century through the age of revolutions.

Former Team Members

Rachael Edmonston

Rachael Edmonston is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, where she majored in history. Her honors thesis, ‘“The too general neglect of the Instruction of their Sex:’ The Importance of Female Education in Damaris Masham’s Life and Philosophy,” explored the life and works of the seventeenth-century female philosopher, and received high honors and the Hoosier Clio Award for the best honors thesis in 2019. In 2018, Rachael received the University of Maryland Library Award for Undergraduate Research for her paper, “Confederate Female Spies: Changing Northern Perceptions in Fiction and Nonfiction and Its Effect on Popular Opinion of the Confederate Cause.” Rachael’s primary historical focus is on examining the private and public lives of women in early modern England, though her involvement in the Slavery, Law, and Power (SLAP) project has widened her interests to include questions of power structures, whether monarchical, patriarchal or racial, on both sides of the Atlantic during the early modern period. Rachael has worked on the SLAP project since January 2018 and has assisted in transcribing, annotating, and writing introductions for the project’s primary source materials. In addition to her work on the SLAP project, Rachael’s interest in history has informed her work as an intern with the American Battlefield Trust–a Washington D.C. based nonprofit dedicated to preserving the battlefields of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War–, her role as a docent at Hampton Mansion, a National Historic Site, and, most recently, in her position as the Secretary for the Winchester Historical Commission.

Ed Summers

Digital Humanities Advisor

Ed has been working for two decades helping bridge the worlds of libraries and archives with the World Wide Web. During that time Ed has worked in academia, start-ups, corporations and the government. He is interested in the role of open source software, community development and open access to enable digital curation. Ed has a MS in Library and Information Science and a BA in English and American Literature from Rutgers University. He is also a PhD student in the UMD iSchool where he studies web archiving practices.

Prior to joining MITH Ed helped build the Repository Development Center (RDC) at the Library of Congress. In that role he led the design and implementation of the NEH funded National Digital Newspaper Program’s web application, which provides access to 8 million newspapers from across the United States. He also helped create the Twitter archiving application that has archived close to 500 billion tweets (as of September 2014). Ed created LC’s image quality assurance service that has allowed curators to sample and review over 50 million images. He served as a member of the Semantic Web Deployment Group at the W3C where he helped standardize SKOS, which he put to use in implementing the initial version of LC’s Linked Data service.

Ed likes to use experiments to learn about the web and digital curation. Examples of this include his work with Wikimedia Labs on Wikistream (which helps visualize the rate of change on Wikipedia); and congressedits, which allows Twitter users to follow edits being made to Wikipedia from the Congress. You can find out more about what Ed is up to by following his blog, his Twitter stream, and his software development activity on Github.