Book Worlds
Colonial Dispositions & Family Fortunes Across Five Generations
Colonial Dispositions & Family Fortunes Across Five Generations
My new book project, tentatively titled Book Worlds: Colonial Dispositions & Family Fortunes Across Five Generations, illuminates how personal, family, and national ambitions are intertwined and co-generative. Tethered on one end to the California gold rush, San Francisco book worlds, print culture, and Mountain Maidu country, it is anchored on the other to the wharves and taverns of 18th-century British North America, the War of Independence, and the civic-building impulses of Philadelphia emigrants.
Conference Presentations
From the British Mid-Atlantic to Gold Rush California: Intergenerational Continuities and Transformations in a Settler-Colonial Family's Ambitions and Identity (2024, Western History Conference, Kansas City).
The "Last Mountain Maidu Medicine Man": Literary Expression of Settler Colonialism (2024, Southwestern Anthropological Association, Los Angeles).
A Gold Rush Bookbinder's Daughter Among the Mountain Maidu: Firsting and Lasting in Northern California (2023, Western History Conference, Los Angeles).
Tracing Colonial Sensibilities Across Generations, Continents, and High Seas (2022, Shattuck Colonial American History Symposium, Sacramento).