Owen Stanwood
Professor, Chairperson of the Department
Biography
Professor Stanwood is a historian of early America, the Atlantic world, and, more generally, of European overseas endeavors during the early modern era. He has a number of interests within this vast field, including the development of the British and French empires, the diffusion of Christianity, intercultural contact and interaction, and the history of exploration. His early work focused on transatlantic religious and political history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including one book on how fears of "popery" galvanized English colonists in the late-1600s, and another tracing the global peregrinations of French Protestant (Huguenot) refugees, who became bit players in dozens of imperial projects. More recently his interests have turned to the early period of exploration and colonization and toward the American interior. His forthcoming book, The Imagined Continent: Explorers and Storytellers in Early North America , examines how extravagant tales of lost Native kingdoms in the heart of America influenced colonization from the sixteenth century through the era of the Revolution. His teaching ranges from colonial and revolutionary America to early modern Europe, including such topics as European-Native relations, the settlement of Boston and New England, the history of Jesuits in North America, and the French Atlantic experience.