Degrees:
Doctor of Philosophy, 1989, Brown University, American Civilization
Master of Arts, 1981, Brown University, American Civilization
Bachelor of Arts, 1979, Brown University, American Civilization
Individual honors and fellowships:
Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture in Africa and the African Diaspora Research Fellowship, African and African American Studies Program, University of Notre Dame, 2000-2001
Missionary Impulse in North American History Grant, 1996-1998
Ames Fellowship, Africana Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 1997 (Travel)
American Academy of Religion Grant, 1996 (Travel)
The Huntington and British Academy Grant, 1996 (Travel)
Library of the Boston Athenæum Catherine Mooney Fellowship, 1996
Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Grant, 1996 (Travel)
Howard Foundation Merit Award for a Work-in-Progress, 1996
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Associateship, 1995-1997
Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities Grant, 1995 (Multimedia Work)
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1994
Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Grant, 1994 (Travel)
Brown University Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity Grant, 1994 (Travel)
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1992-1993
Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, Research Grant, 1992
Brown University Political Science, Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1989-1992
Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1980-1985
National Merit Scholarship, 1975-1979
Grant-funded projects:
NEH Research Program for Black Antislavery Writings, 1760-1829, University of Detroit Mercy, 2002-2004 (Co-Author of Proposal and Co-Director, with Roy E. Finkenbine)
NEH Summer Seminar on Ideas and Actions of the First Black Abolitionists, Colgate University, 2002 (Co-Author of Proposal and Co-Director, with Phillip M. Richards)
United States Information Agency Grant, WMU, 1999 (Co-Author of Proposal and Co-Director, American Studies Seminar for Foreign Educators on Atlantic, Mississippi, Great Lakes, and Pacific Migration)
NEH Grant, H-NET and OIEAHC, 1997 (Editor, a World Wide Web Document on the American Revolution)
Annenberg/CPB Grant, Northeastern University, 1995-1997 (Designer, CD-ROM in Migration in World History since 1500)
Publications (monograph):
Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Publications (documentary collection): Face Zion Forward: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798, co-edited, with an introduction, by Joanna Brooks and John Saillant (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002).
Publications (CD-ROM textbook): Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000, with Patrick Manning et al (Belmont, California: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000).
Publications (essays):
"Missions in Liberia and Race Relations in the U.S.A., 1822-1860," The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, editors, Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker (forthcoming in 2003 from the University of Alabama Press).
"Origins of African American Hermeneutics in the Eighteenth-Century Opposition to the Slave Trade and Slavery," African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York: Continuum, 2000), editor, Vincent L. Wimbush, pp. 236-250.
"Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Black Atlantic," Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture (Volume 69, Number 1: March, 2000): 86-115.
"Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773-1816," Journal of American Studies (Volume 33, Number 3: 1999): 473-490.
"'Wipe away All Tears from Their Eyes': John Marrant's Theology in the Black Atlantic, 1785-1808," The Journal of Millennial Studies (Volume 1, Number 2: Winter, 1999).
"Dress, Power, and Crossing (the Atlantic): Figuring the Black Exodus to Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth Century," The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Newark, New Jersey: University of Delaware Press, 1999), editor, Jessica Munns, pp. 283-301.
"The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson's Colonizationism
and Black Virginians' Migration to Liberia, 1776-1840," Eighteenth-Century
Studies (Volume 31, Number 3: Spring, 1998): 261-282.
"Hymnody in Sierra Leone and the Persistence of an African American Faith," The Hymn (Volume 48, Number 1: January, 1997): 8-17.
"Slavery and Divine Providence in New England Calvinism: The New Divinity and a Black Protest, 1775-1805," The New England Quarterly (Volume 68, Number 4: December, 1995): 584-608.
"Explaining Syncretism in African American Views of Death: An Eighteenth-Century Example," Culture and Tradition (Volume 17: October, 1995): 25-41.
"The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790-1820," Journal of the History of Sexuality (Volume 5, Number 3: January, 1995): 403-428; reprinted in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), editors, Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, pp. 89-111.
"Lemuel Haynes's Black Republicanism and the American Republican Tradition,
1775-1820," Journal of the Early Republic (Volume 14, Number 3:
Fall, 1994): 293-324.
"'Remarkably Emancipated from Bondage, Slavery, and Death': An African American Retelling of the Puritan Captivity Narrative, 1820," Early American Literature (Volume 29, Number 2: 1994): 122-140.
"'A Doctrinal Controversy between the Hopkintonian and the Universalist': Religion, Race, and Ideology in Post-Revolutionary Vermont," Vermont History (Volume 61, Number 4: Fall, 1993): 197-216.
"Black, White, and 'the Charitable Blessed': Race and Philanthropy in the American Early Republic," Essays on Philanthropy, Number 8 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, 1993).
"Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801," Religion and American Culture (Volume 2, Number 1: Winter, 1992): 79-102.
Publications (edited documents):
"'Circular addressed to the
Colored Brethren and friends': An Unpublished Essay by Lott Cary, Sent
from Liberia to Virginia, 1827" (with an introduction and
epilogue), Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
(Volume 104, Number 4: Autumn, 1996): 481-504.
"'The Remarkable
Visionary Dreams of Frederic Swan': An Early African American Woman's
Narrative Text, 1822,"
The North
Star:
A Journal of African-American Religious History
(Volume 1, Number 2: Spring, 1998).
I argue for formal
similarities between this narrative and the African American crazy quilt, shown here from Carson House, Old Fort,
North Carolina (Illustrations courtesy of the American Antiquarian
Society and
Carson House).
"'Some Thoughts on the Subject of Freeing the Negro Slaves in the Colony
of Connecticut, humbly offered to the Consideration of all friends to
liberty & justice,' by Levi Hart, with a Response from Samuel Hopkins,"
The New England Quarterly (Volume 75, Number 1: March, 2002):
107-128.
Publications (encyclopedia entries):
"Richard Allen" and "Lemuel Haynes" in The Oxford Companion to African
American Literature, editors, William L. Andrews, Trudier Harris, and
Francis Smith Foster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
"Jonathan Edwards" in Reader's Guide to American History, editor,
Peter J. Parish (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, Publishers, 1997).
"Lemuel Haynes" in Makers of Christian Theology in America,
editors, James O. Duke and Mark G. Toulouse (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1997).
"Anne Hart" and "Elizabeth Hart" in Dictionary of Literary Biography:
American Women Prose Writers to 1820, Volume 200, editors,
Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy Winans (Detroit: Gale Publishing,
1998).
"Lemuel Haynes" and "Phillis Wheatley" in Encyclopedia of the
Enlightenment (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003; four volumes), editor in chief, Alan Charles
Kors.
"The Connecticut Wits" in Dictionary of American History
(Hew York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003), editor in chief,
Stanley I. Kutler.
"Prince Hall" and "Lemuel Haynes" in Encyclopedia of New England
Culture (forthcoming in 2003 from Yale University Press), editors,
Burt Feintuch and David Watters.
"Richard Allen," "Lott Cary," and "Frederick Douglass" in
Encyclopedia of Protestantism
(forthcoming in four volumes from Routledge), editor, Hans Hillerbrand.
"Lott Cary" in Dictionary of Virginia Biography, volume three
(forthcoming from the Library of Virginia), editors, Sara B. Bearss, John
T. Kneebone, and Brent Tartar.
"Nathaniel Paul," in African American National Biography
(forthcoming from Oxford University Press), editors Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.
"Ottobah Cugoano," "Olaudah Equiano," "James Albert Gronniosaw," "John
Jea," "Ignatius Sancho," and "Prince Saunders," in African American
History Reference Series: The Colonial World and the Young Nation
(forthcoming from Oxford University Press), editors, Paul Finkelman and
Graham Russell Hodges.
Publications (edited collection of essays):
Afro-Virginian History and Culture, edited by John Saillant, in
the series "Cross Currents in African American
History," edited by Graham Russll Hodges and Margaret Washington (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1999).
Publications (electronic works and projects):
The American Revolution: National Discussions of Our Revolutionary
Origins, website funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
(http://REVOLUTION.H-NET.MSU.EDU).
Publications (works in translation):
"'What Terrible Questions We Are Learning to Ask': Emerson,
Abolitionism, and Modernism," appearing as "Abolocionizmus,
transzcendentalizmus es modernizmus: Ralph Waldo Emerson
gondolkodasaban," Aetas (a Hungarian journal of American Studies)
(2001, Number 1): 58-71.
"Lemuel Haynes" in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Volume
4, editors, Hans Dieter Betz, Don S. Browning, Bernd Janowski, and
Eberhard Jüngel (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 2001).
Teaching experience (lecture courses):
"Colonial America" (WMU and Brown)
"The American Revolution" (WMU)
"Early American Literature" (WMU)
"History of the United States to 1877" (MIT)
"Introduction to African American Studies" (Brown [two-semester
course])
"African American History" (MIT)
Teaching experience (seminars):
"Early American Texts and Contexts" (WMU)
"Comparative Slavery" (MIT)
"Race, Religion, and Ideology in Colonial and Revolutionary America"
(Brown)
"Slavery in America from the Colonial Era to the Civil War" (Brown)
"Early African American Religion and Social Thought" (Brown)
"Early African American Literature" (WMU)
Professional service:
Consultant, the Michigan Department of Education and the Michigan
Department of Treasury, Secondary School Social Science, since 2000.
Consultant, "African
Americans and the Bible: An Interdisciplinary
Interpretive Project," Director Vincent L. Wimbush, Union Theological
Seminary, 1997-1999.
Director of graduate fields in early American history and African American
history and religion, WMU, since 1997.
Member of Editorial Board, Journal of the History of Sexuality,
1996-1998.
Mentor, Leadership Alliance Early Identification Program, Brown, 1996.
Staff Member in the Office of the Director, Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, and Editor,
H-OIEAHC, H-NET association for Early American Studies, since 1993.
Director of Undergraduate Honors Theses and Masters' Theses in History,
Brown, 1993-1995.
Referee of manuscripts for Genre, Journal of
the Early Republic, Journal of the History of Sexuality, The North
Star, and William and Mary Quarterly,
since 1994.
Referee of proposals to the National Endowment for the Humanities,
since 1994.
Book reviews, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic,
Early American Literature, African American Review, Church History,
Vermont History, The Public Historian, Craft: The Newsletter of the
CTI Centre for History with Archaeology and Art History, History Microcomputer
Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Guardian (Lagos,
Nigeria), H-OIEAHC, H-SHEAR, and H-NET.
Conference and seminar presentations:
"African American Appropriations of Edwardsean Theology in the Era of
the Slave Trade," Library of Congress Symposium on the Tercentenary of the
Birth of Jonathan Edwards, October 3, 2003.
"Frederick Douglass in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom,"
College Language Association conference, April 26, 2002.
"The Demonization of Islam in Early Black Abolitionism," New England Historical Association
conference, April 21, 2001.
"The Loss of the Feminine in Early Black Abolitionism,"
"The Female
Principle: Eclipses and Reemergences" conference, The University of
Texas at Arlington, March 31, 2000.
"The New Digital History," Monticello, November 12, 1999.
"Eighteenth-Century Black Abolitionism in a Black Atlantic Context,"
York University, Toronto, American History Seminar, November 18, 1998.
"African American Religion on Nantucket," James Bradford Ames
Symposium, Nantucket, June 20, 1998.
"How Do We Racialize Intellectual History?--The Cases of Jefferson and
Emerson," University of Notre Dame Intellectual History Seminar, April 24,
1998.
"The Freedom of the Will/Freedom and the Will," Calvin College
and Seminary H. Henry Meeter
Center
colloquium,
April 15, 1998.
"Text and Context of the Eighteenth-Century Black Bible," Union Theological
Seminary, conference on "African Americans and the Bible," April 3-4, 1997.
"Missionary Work in Liberia and Race Relations in the U.S.A., 1822-1865,"
Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism, conference on the "Missionary
Impulse in North American History," June 18-20, 1997.
"Constructing a Multimedia CD-ROM in Migration in Modern World History,"
Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, seminar on the "History of the
Atlantic World, 1500-1800," September 7, 1996.
"The Adventures of the American Enlightenment in Africa; Or, How Commerce
Is Universal When Democracy Is Not," Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles, workshop on "The Enlightenment's
Impact on America and America's Impact on the Enlightenment," November
17-18, 1995.
"'I Go to Prepare a Place for You': John Marrant's Use of the Bible
and the First Black Exodus to Africa, 1785-1800," Institute of Early American
History and Culture conference, June 3, 1995.
"'Though He's Black, He's Comely Too': The Black Male Body in White
American Antislavery and Proslavery Writings," American Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies conference, March 10, 1994.
Personal information:
Husband of Marie-Louise
Saillant; father of Céline, Clémence, and Théophile
Saillant.
Letters of reference:
Joyce Appleby, Department of History, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los
Angeles, California 90095-1473 (310-825-4601)
Jon Butler, American Studies, Yale University, Box 208236, New Haven,
Connecticut 06520-8236 (203-432-1188)
Joseph Conforti, New England Studies, University of Southern Maine,
11 Granite Street, Portland, Maine 04103 (207-780-4920)
Ronald Hoffman, OIEAHC, Post Office Box 8781, Williamsburg, Virginia
23187-8781 (757-221-1133)
Gordon S. Wood, Department of History, Brown University, Box N, Providence,
Rhode Island 02912 (401-863-2131)
Appendix
Reviews of monographs and collections:
Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral
Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), for Journal of the Early Republic
(Volume 10, Number 1: Spring, 1990): 84-86.
Jürgen Gebhardt, Americanism: Revolutionary Order and
Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University
Press, 1993), for Journal of the Early Republic (Volume 14,
Number 1: Spring, 1994): 129-130.
Conrad Edick Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary
New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), for Ieahcnet,
July, 1994.[H-NET
Reviews]
Sondra O'Neale, Jupiter Hammon and the Biblical Beginnings of African
American Literature, American Theological Library Association
Monograph Series, 28 (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1993), for
Early American Literature (Volume 29, Number 3: 1994): 303-305.
Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in
North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, editors, Mark
A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), for William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series (Volume
52, Number 1: January, 1995): 184-187.
John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology,
1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), for Vermont
History (Volume 63, Number 4: Fall, 1995): 221-225.
Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in
Revolutionary
New England (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995), for
Vermont History (Volume 65, Numbers 1-2: Winter/Spring, 1997):
84-86.
Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking
World of the Eighteenth Century, editor, Vincent Carretta (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1996), for Early American Literature
(Volume
32, Number 2: 1997): 193-195.
Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism
in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1994) for Journal of the History of Sexuality (Volume
8, Number 2: October, 1997): 311-313.
Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and
the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), for NEHA News: The
Newsletter of the New England Historical Association, (Volume 24,
Number 1: April, 1998): 17.
Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and
Their World, Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama, 11 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), for Comparative Drama
(Volume 32, Number 3: Fall, 1998): 434-435.
Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black
Nationalism and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1998) for The Guardian (Lagos), January 4, 1999;
reprinted for H-SHEAR in February, 1999. [H-NET
Reviews]
Arthur Charles Dayfoot, The Shaping of the West Indian Church,
1492-1962 (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies,
1999),
for Church History (Volume 70, Number 2: June, 2001): 363-364.
James Walvin, An African's Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah
Equiano, 1745-1797 (New York: Continuum, 2000), for African
American Review (Volume 35, Number 4: 2001): 664-665.
Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian
Turned Turk, and The Renegado, editor, Daniel J. Vitkus (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), for Comparative Drama (Volume 35,
Number 2: Summer, 2001): 241-242.
Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of
Monticello (Monticello: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000), for The
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Volume 109, Number 3:
2001): 331-332.
Karla F. C. Holloway, Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories,
a Memorial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), for
H-SOUTH, October, 2002.
Patricia C. Click, Time full of Trial: The Roanoke Island
Freedmen's Colony, 1862-1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001), for Church History (Volume 71, Number 4:
December, 2002): 915-916.
Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in
the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), for
H-SHEAR, July, 2003.
Reviews of exhibitions:
Birth of the Nation: First
Federal Congress Project, for The Public
Historian (Volume 23, Number 2: Spring, 2001): 131-132.
The Plymouth
Colony Archive Project, forthcoming in The Journal of American
History.
Reviews of software and CD-ROMs:
[CD-ROM] Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown, Who Built
America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War
of 1914 (Irvington, New York: American Social History Project and The
Voyager Company, 1993), for H-NET, June, 1994; reprinted in Craft: The
Newsletter of the CTI Centre for History with Archaeology and Art History
(University of Glasgow), (Number 9, Summer, 1994): 24-25, and in History
Microcomputer Review (Volume 10, Number 2: Fall, 1994): 78-81.
[CD-ROM] Pennsylvania Gazette, Folio I: 1728-1750 (Malverne,
Pennsylvania: Accessible Archives, 1991), for History Microcomputer
Review (Volume 11, Number 2: Fall, 1995): 60-62.
[CD-ROM] Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language on
CD-ROM, the First and Fourth Editions, editor, Anne McDermott
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for H-NET, April,
1999.
[CD-ROM] Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, Volumes
1-25 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress and Summerfield, Florida:
Historical Database, 1998), for H-NET, April,
1999.