Join the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute online this Monday, January 25, 2021 at 2:30 pm EST (7:30 pm GMT), for a talk by Karin Wulf, professor of history at William & Mary and executive director of the OI. Professor Wulf will draw on the research and materials of the Georgian… Read More
![QueenCharlotte[1]](https://oieahc.wm.edu/wp-content/uploads/QueenCharlotte1.jpeg)
Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. I had just finished an exhilarating but exhausting first year at the University of Connecticut and was petrified about turning my dissertation into a book. It had been an incredible stroke of luck to land at UConn, and it seemed particularly miraculous in light of how my dissertation project had perplexed many of the hiring committees I had met the previous year. My work focused on how the visceral emotional response to child-victims worked as a political force in colonial and early republican America. In 2003, few people in early American studies saw children as something that could or should be analyzed. How, I was asked again and again, could the early American child be a historically legible factor in political theory and action? Children were too innocent, too incompetent, and (perhaps most important for someone who needed to land a peer-reviewed book contract within the next three years) too inaccessible to write about with any real rigor. Read More