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Welcome BJ Lillis, 2025-2026 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow

BJ Lillis is an early American historian specializing in the intersections between Indigenous history, Atlantic slavery, and settler-colonial political economy. They are currently the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, and received their Ph.D from Princeton University in 2024. Their project A Valley Between Worlds: Slavery, Dispossession, and the Creation of a Settler-Colonial Society in the Hudson Valley, 1674-1766, is a history of colonial New York’s manors and large estates that explores the contested relationship between land, labor, and property in the 18th-century Hudson Valley. Before graduate school, BJ worked in public history at the Museum of the City of New York. They are also known for their acclaimed collaborations with the artist Lissa Rivera, Beautiful Boy and The Silence of Spaces, on the history and performance of gender.

As an OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, BJ will expand both the geographic reach and conceptual scope of their manuscript. They will incorporate new research on manors in the southern Hudson Valley controlled by families who were not only dependent on enslaved labor to manage their homes and estates, but also deeply invested in the slave trade at trans-Atlantic, inter-American, and local levels. And they will also expand their comparative research on European and American manorialism, exploring how the “Atlantic manor” offers a revealing point of connection between the changes in property and labor relations that characterized the early history of capitalism in Europe—including enclosure, farm consolidation, agricultural improvement, and commercialization—to the political economy of North American colonialism.

As they pursue this research, BJ will also expand their project methodologically, prioritizing the incorporation of visual and material sources—including maps, paintings, and engravings, as well as agricultural landscapes, tools, and practices—to deepen their analysis of the settler-colonial landscapes that underlay New York’s manors and manorial households.