DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Apply for one of the following Coffeehouses by September 11 September 18, 2026.
Seats at these tables are limited and participants are expected to commit to regular attendance throughout the academic year.
Just Added!
Just Write
Kathleen (Katy) Telling (John Carter Brown Library 2026 Postdoc Coordinator)
Thursdays 10:00 am – NOON EST
Limited to 12 participants
HOW TO APPLY: Please be prepared to provide an abbreviated CV and a 500-word description of your current project.
APPLY HERE
New Approaches to the Study of Peace, Violence, and War in Vast Early America
Casey Schmitt (Cornell University)
2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month, 3:00-4:30 EST
Limited to 9 participants
HOW TO APPLY: Please be prepared to provide an abbreviated CV and a 500-word description of your current project.
APPLY HERE
Recent scholarship has brought new perspectives to the study of imperial warfare and its aftermath in vast early America. Violence, war, and peace have always been central to the study of early America, but centering categories of race, gender, and class have reshaped older narratives that framed warfare through the lens of European imperial contests over land and trade. These new approaches to the study of violence, war, and peace have drawn from legal, environmental, and social history methodologies as well as from histories of race, slavery, gender, and class.
This table will bring together scholars at all career stages interested in the new histories of violence, war, and peace in vast early America. Fellows will have the opportunity to select a reading for the group and to circulate a draft of their own work for feedback. Meetings will provide space for scholars of early America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Atlantic Africa, and Europe to read and discuss methodological and archival approaches to the study of conflict and its aftermath.
Casey Schmitt is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University where she teaches classes on race, slavery, and colonialism in early America and the Caribbean. She is the author of The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press 2025), which was awarded the John R. Lyman Book Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History. Her articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and Early American Studies.
Writing Across Regions in Native North America: A Writing Group for Second Book Projects
Lucas Kelley (Valparaiso University) and Aubrey Lauersdorf (Florida State University)
Alternate Tuesdays, 3:30-4:30 EST
Limited to 16 participants
HOW TO APPLY: Please be prepared to provide a two-page c.v. and a short paragraph about a research topic for a Coffeehouse presentation.
This OI Coffeehouse table is designed to create a writing group for scholars working on second book projects related to Native American history. Our idea for this program emerged from our belief that the study of Native North America is too fractured. We are both scholars of the Native South and often find ourselves solely in conversation with other scholars who study the same region rather than those who focus on the same time period as we do. Thus, we hope that this OI Coffeehouse will bring regional conversations about Native history together to create a broader conversation about themes in Native American history that are continent-wide. We intend for this Coffeehouse to create a space for scholars of Native peoples of New England, the Ohio Valley, the South, the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest, and more to share their ideas and learn from each other, avoiding the artificial regional distinctions that so often divide us. Participants need not have their first book in print, but they should be far enough in the publication process that they have begun conceptualizing or drafting material for a second book project, including chapters or even book proposals. Ideally, this second project will be at a stage where authors are still working through major ideas and arguments, and authors should not use this writing group to help them polish pieces that are already near completion. The program will consist of biweekly conversations of pre-circulated material. Pieces should be shared within the group two weeks before a scheduled discussion. Every participant should plan to share their work at least once. To start each session, the author of the pre-circulated paper will speak for 5-10 minutes. At this time, the author can suggest a focus for the discussion, if they have not already indicated this when circulating the draft. The meetings will be designed to be true conversations without either the performative pressure of a conference panel or the detailed critique of journal reviewers. Our goal is to replicate the collegial atmosphere of graduate school for those of us that rarely have such opportunities in our current positions.
Lucas Kelley is an Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he teaches courses on early American history, Native American history, and public history. He received his PhD in history from the University of North Carolina, his MA in history from Virginia Tech, and his BA in history from Centre College. His first book, Marking Native Borders: Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country was published in May 2025 by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Aubrey Lauersdorf is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University specializing in North American borderlands and the Native South in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She received her MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first book, Apalachee Coast: Indigenous Power in the Colonial Gulf South, is currently under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press and expected in 2027.
The States of Information: Knowledge, Networks, and Secrecy in Vast Early America
Edward Blum (San Diego State University)
1st and 3rd Thursday of each month, 3:00-4:30 pm EST
Limited to 10 participants
HOW TO APPLY: Please be prepared to provide an Abbreviated CV and a one-paragraph description of the role of “information” in your project(s).
APPLY HERE
How did people know, or trust, or confirm what they knew in Vast Early America? This Coffeehouse invites scholars to consider how information was created, gathered, organized, circulated, concealed, and contested across the Atlantic world and continental America. We’ll consider “information” capaciously, as well as the concept of information itself, to include correspondence networks, newspapers, wampum, storytelling, pamphlets, censuses, maps, bureaucratic records, or other forms of knowledge exchange.
While virtually all historians rely on information as evidence, this Coffeehouse is designed for scholars interested in making information itself an object of inquiry. As historians increasingly draw attention to where source materials came from, how they were kept and arranged, what information has been lost or hidden, and which information we have access to today, this Coffeehouse hopes to foster conversations that transcend national, imperial, chronological, and disciplinary boundaries and encourage new approaches to understanding the early American past.
We welcome works and scholars exploring connections between information and empire, revolution, state formation, Indigenous sovereignty, slaveries, resistance, diplomacy, commerce, and community formation. We welcome studies that are local and particular to global and broad.
Katlyn Carter, author of Democracy in Darkness, and Asheesh Siddique, author of The Archive of Empire, have both agreed to join the coffeehouse for at least one session, discuss their past and current projects, and engage with group members’ projects. Other guests will be announced once the workshop starts.
Edward Blum is a historian of early American history and nineteenth-century United States history at San Diego State University. Recently, he is the author of “The Proper Data” (The William and Mary Quarterly) on the role of numerical information in forming revolutionary governments during the American Revolution and ultimately the Constitutional republic itself. Blum is the project director of the American Revolution and Constitution History Project, as well the author of several books on race, religion, and nationalism (The Color of Christ; Reforging the White Republic; War is all Hell; W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet).
Working Group on Gender, Emotion, and Knowledge-Making in the Early Atlantic World, 1550–1850
Claire Becker (University of Rochester) and Sarabeth Rambold (Southern Methodist University)
Selected Fridays 1:00-3:00 EST
Limited to 6 participants, early career scholars preferred
HOW TO APPLY: Please be prepared to provide an abbreviated cv and a 300-word summary of what you hope to present this year and how your project connects to the working group’s overarching focus on gender, emotion, and knowledge-making in the Early Atlantic World (1550-1850).
We aim to build an interdisciplinary community for emerging scholars working on the intersection of gender and emotion in the early Atlantic world (ca. 1550–1850). We hope to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career faculty whose work engages histories of gender, emotion, family, labor, religion, empire, race, colonialism, and knowledge production. We will meet monthly (first Friday of every month) to facilitate a works-in-progress workshop. Each month 1 or 2 participants will circulate drafts of articles, dissertation chapters, conference papers, book chapters, or other research projects one week in advance, along with a brief author’s note outlining the project’s stage, central questions, and desired feedback. Participants will use the intervening week to read closely and prepare comments addressing both the author’s goals and broader methodological and historiographical questions raised by the work.
Claire Becker is a PhD candidate in the University of Rochester’s Department of History. They research the connections between emotion, experience, and power in the early modern Spanish empire. Their first book project examines how Hispanic religious women used sacred material culture to create knowledge and provide care. They are also embarking on a second project that explores emotional restraint and ideals of masculinity during the so-called seventeenth-century “crisis of masculinity.”
Sarabeth Rambold is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. She studies how early Anglo-American women produced forms of authority in unexpected spaces. Her current manuscript examines how educated matriarchs fashioned themselves as domestic intellectuals, generating and transmitting knowledge through “women’s work,” including domestic, familial, and emotional labor. Her second project explores the emergence of child incarceration in the North and South in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on women’s role in shaping early American carceral culture.
