Michael J. Becker and Devin Leigh expand on the origin of their piece in the October 2025 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. The first page of Andrew Reddie’s “Sketch of the Eboes” from 1796. © The British Library, London As the first memoir written by a formerly enslaved person,… Read More
Today’s post is a reprint from the September 12 edition of The Scholarly Kitchen. In it, Karin Wulf asks whether projects that are born digital require a different peer review process. In 2016 the American Association of University Presses released a handbook of Best Practices for Peer Review. Focused on books, the handbook is intended “as a resource… Read More
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… Read More
Welcome Patrick Barker, 2025-2026 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow Patrick Barker is an assistant professor of History at Miami Dade College–Hialeah Campus. He received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2023. In 2024, his dissertation—“‘She Would Cut Canes No Longer: Slavery and Everyday Struggle in Trinidad, 1769-1834”—was awarded the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize from the Southern Historical… Read More
By Kaitlin Tonti (Hollins University) Kaitlin Tonti was the recipient of an Omohundro Institute—Mount Vernon Digital Collections Fellowship in 2018. This post describes the work she undertook as a fellow. You can read more about the project here. During my fellowship at the New York Public Library (NYPL) in the summer of 2018, I stumbled… Read More
J.E. Morgan, 2023-2024 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow J.E. Morgan is a historian of gender, race, and sexuality and the intersections of culture and law in the Anglo-Atlantic of the long eighteenth century. Dr. Morgan completed her doctorate in history at Emory University in 2021 and has received research support from the Cromwell Foundation and American Legal Society and the McNeil… Read More
Welcome Noel Edward Smyth, 2023–2024 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow Noel E. Smyth is an assistant professor of History at Vassar College and is a historian of the Native American South, Afro-Indigenous Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, specializing in Indigeneity, slavery, and settler colonialism. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2016). He has previously… Read More
Welcome Catherine (Catie) Peters, 2024–2025 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow Catherine (Catie) Peters is an interdisciplinary historian of the Caribbean whose research centers on overlapping diasporas, intimacy, and the environment. She received her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2021. Dr. Peters has held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and Tufts University, where she has also taught courses… Read More
Welcome Hannah R. Abrahamson, 2024–2025 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow Hannah R. Abrahamson is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at College of the Holy Cross where she teaches courses on early modern Latin America, Indigenous history, and histories of gender and sexuality. She earned her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2022, which received dissertation awards from the Latin American… Read More
Reconsidering Commemorations at the U.S. 250th This past summer, over twenty OI Associates from the U.S. and Canada rose out of their beach chairs once a week to tune into an OI Coffeehouse on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Organized by Maria DiBenigno, Hilary Miller, and Amy Speckart, three members of the Revolutionary… Read More
Reconsidering Commemorations at the U.S. 250th This past summer, over twenty OI Associates from the U.S. and Canada rose out of their beach chairs once a week to tune into an OI Coffeehouse on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Organized by Maria DiBenigno, Hilary Miller, and Amy Speckart, three members of the Revolutionary… Read More
Reconsidering Commemorations at the U.S. 250th This past summer, over twenty OI Associates from the U.S. and Canada rose out of their beach chairs once a week to join an OI Coffeehouse titled “Revolutionary Narratives: Reconsidering Commemorations at the U.S. 250th.” Organized by Maria DiBenigno, Hilary Miller, and Amy Speckart, three members of the Revolutionary Narratives working group,… Read More