NEH Postdoctoral Fellow — Mark G. Hanna

Background

Mark G. Hanna is a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture from the fall of 2008 to the spring of 2010.  He is also an assistant professor of history at the University of California in San Diego.  Professor Hanna received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 2006. He received outside graduate fellowships from the Center for New World Comparative Studies at the John Carter Brown Library, the W. M. Keck Foundation at the Huntington Library, and postdoctoral fellowships from the Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund from the Harvard University Law School, a William Nelson Cromwell Fellowship from the American Society for Legal History, and an Arthur H. Cole Grant from the Economic History Association.  Dr. Hanna’s dissertation, “The Pirate Nests: The Impact of Piracy on Newport and Charles Town, 1670-1730,” not only challenges prevailing interpretations of piracy; it also uses the phenomenon of piracy to illuminate the history of early America in the Atlantic World. His research is quintessentially multidisciplinary, with a legal historical base grounded in the Navigation Acts, early trials from the Admiralty courts, and shipping records; an interdisciplinary historical analysis of the economic underpinnings, social networks, and political support of pirate activity on land and sea; and the cultural nuance of print culture, both the literary world of historical fiction and the more ephemeral rough-and-tumble of early newspapers.

Courses

“The Golden Age of Piracy” upper level seminar that will be offered again in the spring semester of 2010.