Emma Hart teaches and researches the history of early North America, the Atlantic World, and early modern Britain between 1500 and 1800. Her major research interests lie in urban history, social, and economic history, as well as in the intersections of history, material culture, urban studies, geography and sociology. She has written two books, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World and Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism. She has published scholarly articles in journals including The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, and Urban History, where she co-edited a special issue on early modern cities and globalization with Mariana Dantas. She also contributed essays to The Cambridge History of America and the World and The Cambridge History of the American Revolution (forthcoming).

Hart is currently developing two new research projects: a biography of the eighteenth-century Scottish novelist, historian, and essayist, Tobias Smollett; and a long history of America’s urban-rural divide. She is a founding board member of the Global Urban History Project, a transnational online collective of scholars. In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. At Penn she is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a co-editor of the Penn Press series, “Early American Studies.”