Meet the Team Behind the Washington Early American Seminar
Richard Bell
Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland – College Park
He holds a PhD from Harvard University and is author of the new book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home. He has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest honor for teaching faculty in the Maryland state system. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award. He serves as a Trustee of the Maryland Historical Society, as an elected member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His professional website is www.richard-bell.com.
Christopher Bonner
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland – College Park
Christopher Bonner specializes in African American history and the nineteenth-century United States. He published Remaking the Republic: Black Protest and the Creation of American Citizenship, in March 2020 with the University of Pennsylvania Press. This book centers free black Americans in the legal transformations of the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Prof. Bonner is currently at work on a project exploring the ways enslaved people navigated commercial networks as they sought to purchase freedom in the early nineteenth century. He teaches courses covering African American politics and culture, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, the transformations of the United States during the nineteenth century, and race and ethnicity in early America. Originally from Chesapeake, VA, he earned his B.A. from Howard University and Ph.D. from Yale University.
Holly Brewer
Burke Chair of American Cultural and Intellectual History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland – College Park
Holly Brewer is 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, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across the empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice. She has won numerous fellowships and book and article prices, including the Biennial Book Prize of the Order of the Coif , the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Cromwell Prize, the Clifford Prize, the Douglass Adair Memorial Award. 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 The King’s Slaves: Creating America’s Plantation System, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, for which she was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities and the National Humanities Center in 2009, the Starr Center in 2012, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. Articles that provide a foretaste of that book include “Slavery, Sovereignty & Inheritable Blood” (AHR, 2017) and “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England & its New World Empire” (LHR, 2021). She has written or contributed to many amicus briefs for cases before the Supreme Court. In 2024, she was the main author for an historians’ amicus brief in Trump v. United States , the case on presidential immunity. She teaches courses in American history, Atlantic World, and legal history.
Zachary Dorner
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park
Zachary Dorner specializes in the histories of empire, exchange, and medicine across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. His first book, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century, addresses medicine’s codependence on plantation agriculture, long-distance trade, financial markets, and colonial warfare. For some, medicinal commodities offered the prospect of power and wealth, but for others they were part of the mechanisms of enslavement that prompted reconsiderations of the bodies and remedies that moved across emergent global networks. It was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020 and was shortlisted for several prizes. Prof. Dorner is working on a second book that reexamines the many definitions of care that existed for the dependent populations of people tasked with doing the work of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—namely enslaved men, women, and children, military veterans, the poor, prisoners, and servants. He teaches courses on the Atlantic world and early America in addition to courses on the histories of medicine and drugs. Prof. Dorner received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and Ph.D. from Brown University, and finds that his undergraduate degree in biology still comes in handy.
Clare Lyons
Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland – College Park
Clare Lyons is an Early American social and cultural historian, who specializes in the history of sexuality, gender, and women. Her research and teaching interests span colonial, revolutionary, and nineteenth-century U.S history, comparative and trans-regional colonial histories, the global history of the Anglo-early-modern world, and the history of sexuality in the United States from the colonial era to today. Her first book explored the transition from early modern to modern society when enlightenment philosophies denaturalized existing social and political hierarchies, and gender gained new saliency to legitimate inequality. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia 1730-1830 was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (2006) and awarded the James Broussard Best First Book Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early Republic.