Biography

I am an historian of early American and Atlantic World history. Both my research and teaching emphasize early American and Atlantic World encounters among peoples of indigenous, European, and African descent. My areas of specialization include religion and political culture, Native American history, slavery and abolition, and peace history.

I research and write about how early modern peoples negotiated violence, colonialism, and warfare and what this tells us about our present-day engagement with these problems. My current book project, A Colonizing Peace, advances a new conceptualization of peace as a process of "right ordering" that shaped how Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and people of African descent negotiated violence and ordered their families and households. Histories of peacemaking, I argue, are the key to understanding imperial governance and the origins of Anglo-American humanitarianism.

Out Now:
The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic, eds. Michael Goode and John Smolenski (Brill, 2018)

Specter of Peace highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence and to consider how colonial Americans confronted violence as a moral problem; how ideologies of peace informed popular and political debates about violence, warfare, and colonialism; and how peace was woven through the myriad interactions between and among settlers, Native Americans, and people of African descent.

Teaching