Melissa N. Morris, Assistant Professor, History
University of Wyoming, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie, WY 82071
melissa.morris@uwyo.edu
EMPLOYMENT
University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, Assistant Professor of History, 2018-
Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, Assistant Professor of History, 2017-2018
EDUCATION
Columbia University, Doctor of Philosophy in History, 2010-2017
- Dissertation: Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Upstart Empires, 1580-1660
- Faculty Advisor: Christopher L. Brown
- Exam Fields: Atlantic World, Early Modern Europe, Colonial America, Nineteenth Century U.S.
Miami University, Master of Arts, Atlantic World History, 2008-2010
- Thesis: “Diversions of Empire: Geographic Representations of the English Atlantic, 1589-1700”
- Faculty Advisor: Carla Gardina Pestana
Miami University, Bachelor of Arts, 2000-2004
- Majors: History and Mass Communications
AREAS OF RESEARCH AND TEACHING
Atlantic World; Colonial and Early Republic United States; Comparative Early Americas; Environmental History; Caribbean History; Early Modern World; Colonization and Empire; Botanical History; Geography
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
Fellow, Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library (summer 2019)
Fellow, Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research (WIHR) (spring 2019)
Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania (2016-2017)
Colonial Williamsburg/Omohundro Institute Visiting Fellowship (May-June 2016)
Travel Funding, New Netherland Institute in Cooperation with the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York (June 2018; June 2015)
Center for New World Comparative Studies Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library (May-June 2015)
Richard Hofstadter Faculty Fellowship, Columbia University (2010-2015)
The Global Early Modern Caribbean Residential Seminar, Huntington Library (July 2014)
Curtis Gates Lloyd Fellowship, Lloyd Library and Museum (April-May 2014)
PUBLICATIONS
Peer-Reviewed:
“Virginia and the Amazonian Alternative,” in Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America, ed. Paul Musselwhite, Peter Mancall, and James Horn (2019, UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)
“Spanish and Indigenous Influence on Virginia Tobacco Cultivation,” Atlantic Environments and the American South: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson II (2019, University of Georgia Press)
“Tobacco” in The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, ed. Jeannie Whayne (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)
Encyclopedia Entries and Textbooks:
“Circumnavigation of the Globe (1519-1522)” and “The Columbian Exchange” in The Spanish Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia , ed. H. Micheal Tarver (2016 ABC-CLIO)
Contributor, The American Yawp: A Free and Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook
Selected Other Writing:
“Letter to the Editor,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2016
“Hogshead Revisited,” Uncommon Sense, the blog of the Omohundro Institute, August 24, 2016
“The Plant that Built a Nation,” Lloydiana Spring 2014
PRESENTATIONS
Conference Presentations:
“Latin American Roots, North American Shoots: The Influence of the Environment and Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean,” Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory State College, Pennsylvania, September 2019 (panel sponsored by the William and Mary Quarterly and the Hispanic American Historic Review)
“New Netherland Plantations and the (Mid-) Atlantic World,” Investigating Mid-Atlantic Plantations, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, October 2019
“Tobacco and Resistance in the Early Modern Atlantic,” Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, June 2019
“Guiana and Geographies of Resistance,” Zones and Lines, Water and Land: New Conversations on Borders, Cardiff University, Wales, UK, May 22-24, 2019
“Spanish Models in Northern European Colonial Environments,” Fire and Water: Entangled Histories of Empire and Science in the Early Modern Americas Symposium, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, September 21-23, 2017
“Farmers Without Borders: Tobacco’s Cross-Cultural Cultivation in the Seventeenth Century,” Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting, Grand Rapids, MI, June 8-10, 2017
“Tobacco and Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge,” Pocahontas and After: historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617-2017, British Library and Institute for Historical Research, London, March 16-18, 2017
“Imperial Fantasy and Environmental Reality in the Seventeenth Century English Atlantic,” The North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., November 12, 2016
“African and Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge in the Dutch and English Atlantic, 1600-1640,” Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Annual Conference, Worcester, MA, June 25, 2016
“A Leafy Dominion: Local Conditions and Global Demand in the Virginian Tobacco Trade, 1600-1800,” Atlantic Environments and the American South, Rice University, Houston, TX, February 6, 2016
“Before Brazil: Knowledge and Experience in the Early Dutch Empire,” Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and the Society of Early Americanists Joint Conference, Chicago, IL, June 20, 2015
“Cultivating a Caribbean Commonwealth: The Tobacco Trade and Imperial Cooperation on Seventeenth-Century St. Christopher,” The North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, November 9, 2012
“States of Belonging: Challenges to Imperial Dominance in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean,” The Association of Caribbean Historians Conference, Willemstad, Curaçao, May 14, 2012
“States of Belonging: Challenges to Imperial Dominance in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean,” The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) Conference, April 21, 2012
“Island of Divers Interests: St. Christopher and the Many Meanings of Belonging in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean,” Northeast Conference on British Studies, College of the Holy Cross, October 29, 2011
“Diversions of Empire: Geographic Knowledge and Empire-Making in the Seventeenth Century British Atlantic,” Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, April 15, 2010
“Geography and Identity in Early English New York,” Midwest Conference on British Studies, University of Pittsburgh, October 10, 2009
“Dutch Travel Narratives of New Netherland,” “Emerging Scholars, Evolving Scholarship: Loyola University History Graduate Student Conference,” Chicago, IL, April 25, 2009 G
Commentator:
Panel, “Digital Revolution: A Roundtable on Big Data Analysis of Eighteenth Century America,” Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Annual Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, June 17, 2017
Indiana University
Invited Talks:
“Guiana at the Center of the World: Failed Colonies, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Origins of Empires,” University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology Seminar Series, February 8, 2019
“Before Virginia: How Lost Colonies, Caribbean Pirates, and Spanish Settlers Made Colonial North America,” Keynote Speaker, Black Hills State University Undergraduate Research Symposium, December 5, 2018
“Planting Colonies: Tobacco Cultivation from Canada to the Caribbean,” Pre-circulated paper presented to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Seminar, Philadelphia, PA, September 14, 2018
“Across the Atlantic, Across the Channel: Anglo-Dutch Cooperation in the Seventeenth Century,” Pre-circulated paper presented to the Providence College Seminar on Early American History, Providence, RI, May 5, 2018
“‘Perfecting the Mystery of Planting’: Learning to Grow Tobacco in the Atlantic World,” John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, Fellow’s Talk, June 17, 2015
“Tobacco in the Lloyd Library Collection,” Lloyd Library, Cincinnati, OH, Fellow’s Talk, May 30, 2014
TEACHING
Instructor:
HP 4152: UW in Scotland: Scottish Rural Spaces (summer 2019)
HIST 5615: Graduate Colloquium in Early America (spring 2019)
HIST 4410/5410: America in an Early Modern World (fall 2018)
HIST 3020: Historical Methods (fall 2018; spring 2019)
HIST 3500 Colonial America (spring 2018; fall 2019)
HIST 4030: A Botanical History of European Expansion, 1400-1850 (fall 2015; spring 2018)
HIST 4441: The American Revolution (fall 2017)
HIST 1211: United States History to 1865 (fall 2018; spring 2018; fall 2017)
Additional Mentoring and Teaching:
Faculty Learning Community on Critical and Creative Thinking, Elbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Wyoming, Spring 2019
Lead Teaching Fellows Program, Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; led, organized, and attended workshops on improving graduate student teaching (2015-2016)
Graduate Assistant, History Department Senior Thesis European Research Initiative; mentored students researching in European archives and writing senior theses, New York and Paris (2014-2015)
Teaching Coordinator, Columbia University History Department; developed workshops and served as a liaison for teaching assistants (2012-2013)
SERVICE
Steering Committee Member, Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research
Anonymous reader for manuscripts submitted to William and Mary Quarterly and Environmental History
University of Wyoming History Department: Graduate Education Committee; Curriculum Committee; Social Media and Marketing Coordinator
Columbia University Early America Faculty Search, Graduate Student Committee Member (spring 2016)
Rapporteur, Columbia University Seminar on Early American History and Culture (2015-2016; 2011-2013)
MUSEUM EXHIBITS
“Biodiversity and its Histories,” New York Public Library, in conjunction with the New York Botanical Garden and Columbia University History in Action, Exhibit Design Team, (April-May 2017)
DIGITAL HUMANITIES
“Mapping the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” (poster session), American Historical Association Annual Conference, Denver, CO, January 7, 2017
Certified in ArcGIS and proficient with other mapping platforms
Participant in the “Making and Knowing Project,” an open-access digital critical edition of a late sixteenth-century French manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Fr. 640 (June 2014)
ARCHIVAL RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
National Archives (UK); British Library; Bodleian Library (Oxford); Bristol Record Office (UK); Archivo General de Indias (Seville); Archives Nationales (Paris); Archives Diplomatiques (Paris); Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence); Stadsarchief Amsterdam; Nationaal Archief (The Hague); John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI); Arents Collection, New York Public Library; Colonial Williamsburg Special Collections; Swem Library Special Collections, College of William & Mary (Williamsburg, VA); Lloyd Library (Cincinnati, OH)
RESEARCH LANGUAGES
Spanish (proficient); French (proficient); Dutch (proficient)
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
American Historical Association
Hakluyt Society
Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture
Friends of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Melissa N. Morris 