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 one 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 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.
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.