Conference Program

*See Abstracts Here

Friday, October 30

Running Away, Seeking Refuge: Enslaved People’s Movement Under Inspection (11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST)

James McKay (University of Edinburgh) – “Gone towards Carolina”: Refugees from Slavery in Occupied Charleston, 1780-1782

Evan Turiano (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – Fugitive Slaves, Legal Rights, and the First Abolition

Anna O. Law (CUNY Brooklyn College) – The Migration and Importation Clause’s Scope: Defining the Freedom of Movement at the Founding

Oceans Away and the Town Down the Road: Movement and Trade in the Wider Atlantic World (1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST)

Yiyun Huang (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville) – John Adams and China: Globalizing Early America

Tim Betz (Lehigh University) – “We Demand Flamingos”: Contextualizing Collecting in the Spanish Empire

Katie Labor (University of Maryland – College Park) – Private Homes, Publick Houses: Travelers and Domestic Privacy in 18th Century America

Islands of Creations: The Caribbean In Early America (3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EST)

Nicholas Crawford (Washington University in St. Louis) – Petitioning Slavery: Legal Marronage in the British Caribbean, 1816-1823

Geneva Smith (Princeton University) – Accounting for Slave Courts

Kimberly Takahata (Columbia University) – Indigenous Refusal and Natural History in Suriname

Elise A. Mitchell (New York University) – Freedom in the Flesh: Smallpox Inoculation and Embodied Kinship in the Atlantic World

Saturday, October 31

Building Values & Ideals: Culture in the Early Americas (11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST)

Lindsay Keiter (Penn State Altoona) – “From the ‘Matrimonial Lottery’ to the ‘Marriage Market’”

Janine Yorimoto Boldt (American Philosophical Society) – The Portrait of “Conotocaurious;” or, George Washington Reconsidered

Lauren Michalak (University of Maryland – College Park) – Looking Towards London: The Gordon Riots as Reaffirmation of the Patriot Cause

Emily Gowen (Boston University) – Steady Sellers and Common Readers in the 19th Century U.S.

Imagined Difference: Race in the Atlantic World (1:30 p.m – 3:00 p.m. EST)

Aston Gonzalez (Salisbury University) – The Science and Creativity of Revolutionary Black Genius

Sophie Hess (University of Maryland – College Park) – Hollow Ground: Alienation and Environment in Benjamin Banneker’s Maryland

Mairin Odle (University of Alabama) – “Cruell and fantasticall inventions”: English Ideas of Body Modification in the Atlantic World

A Religious Nation: Faith and Government in Early America (3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EST)

Timothy Grieve-Carlson (Rice University) – The Subtle Domination of the Soul: Quaker Governance and the Origins of the Carceral State

Rebecca Brenner Graham (American University) – Saturday Observers and the Sunday Mail Controversy of the Early Republic

Matthew Fischer (University of Maryland – College Park) – Reclaiming the Past: Slave Names and the Development of Afro-Christian Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean