Category: Interviews

Interviews, Special Features

Interview with Katie Moore, Winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Cromwell Article Prize

EAS Miscellany sat down recently to talk with Katie Moore about the research for her Spring 2023 EAS article, “To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere,” which recently won the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize from the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). Congratulations Katie! Why did you choose to research paper money, counterfeiting, and colonial politics? What interested you about the…

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Interviews, Special Features

Interview with Viviana Díaz Balsera, Author of the Fall 2024 Free Access EAS Article

EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Fall 2024 author Viviana Díaz Balsera to talk about her article, “Light of Egypt Shining from Within: Fr. Gregorio de Movilla and the Tercero Cathecismo for the Timucua (1625).” For a limited time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE. Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? Good luck and a number of coincidences led me to the…

EAS
Interviews, Special Features

Interview with Meg Toth, Managing Editor of Early American Studies

What inspired you to specialize in American Studies? When I started my Ph.D. at Tufts University, I was convinced I would specialize in Victorian British literature. I had taken excellent courses in Victorian studies for my M.A. degree at Boston College, and I imagined writing my dissertation on authors like Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, and Wilkie Collins. Then, in my first semester at Tufts, I took an American literature class…

EAS
Interviews, Special Features

Interview with Jonathan Eacott, Author of the Summer 2024 Free Access EAS Article

EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Summer 2024 author Jonathan Eacott to talk about his article, “‘Elephant Murder’: ‘Lessons on Humanity and Benevolence’.” For a short period of time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE. Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I kept stumbling into elephants when I was working on my first book, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain…

EAS
Interviews, Special Features

Interview with Douglas Winiarski, Author of the Spring 2024 Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? My article, “Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet,” began as a COVID project. I was already familiar with the journal of Quaker philanthropist William Allinson, in which he described his dinner conversation with Hendrick Aupaumut, and I was intrigued by the idea that Laloeshiga/Tenskwatawa started receiving visions several years earlier than historians had previously thought. With special collections…

EAS
Interviews

Interview with Zachary M. Bennett, 2023 Murrin Prize Winner

Zachary M. Bennett’s article, “‘Canoes of Great Swiftness’: Rivercraft and War in the Northeast” EAS 21, No. 2 (Spring 2023), won the 2023 Murrin Prize. The Murrin Prize is named for John Murrin (1936-2020), Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, who was a scholar of early American history and an active member of the McNeil Center community. The prize is awarded annually for the best article in EAS. The prize…

EAS
Interviews

Interview with Peter Olsen-Harbich, Associate Director, MCEAS

As the spring semester winds down, Peter J. Olsen-Harbich is also finishing up his first year as the McNeil Center’s new Associate Director with the remit of Academic Affairs. It’s an exciting time for MCEAS, and we at EAS Miscellany wanted to learn more about his work at the Center and in the field of early American studies more generally. Peter graciously took the time to answer some questions posed…

EAS
Interviews

Interview with Ilka Brasch, Author of the Fall 2023 Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I initially read Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s political satire Modern Chivalry because I am fascinated by literature that is somewhat puzzling, written in a fragmented or meandering style, that is self-reflexive and offers narratives or opinions that need historical contextualization to be understood. I was also drawn to texts of the Early Republic that have a unique…

EAS
Interviews

Interview with Jordan B. Smith, Wayne D. Rasmussen Award Recipient

Why did you choose to research the making of rum in Barbados? What led you to explore the role of Indigenous people and enslaved Africans in the creation of rum? This article is part of a larger project examining the invention of rum and its emergence as a quintessentially Atlantic commodity in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The project has several inspirations. One was an undergraduate thesis that I…

EAS
Interviews

Interview with Tom Arne Midtrød, Author of the Summer 2023, Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I came to this research topic while teaching an upper-level undergraduate course on war and violence in early North America. In the class, we spent some time reading a series of articles on the question of whether—or to what extent—Native Americans were subjected to genocide (or a series of genocides) during the period of European and…

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