History Department Faculty
Owen Stanwood
Professor, Chairperson of the Department
Owen Stanwood
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall Room S347
Telephone: 617-552-6342
Email: owen.stanwood@bc.edu
Education
- Ph.D., Northwestern University
Research Interests
Colonial America; Atlantic and global history; early modern European expansion and imperialism
Department
Biography
Professor Stanwood is a historian of colonial 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.
He is the author of two books. The first, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (2011), examined how fears of Catholicism galvanized and transformed Anglo-American political culture during the last decades of the seventeenth century. His newest book, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in the Age of Empire (2020), focuses on the global diaspora of French Protestant refugees, who scattered around the world after Louis XIV revoked their right to freedom of worship in 1685, settling in communities stretching from New England to the Indian Ocean and playing a leading role in the development of the British and Dutch empires.
His teaching ranges from colonial and revolutionary America to early modern Europe, including such topics as European-Indian relations, the settlement of Boston and New England, the history of Jesuits in North America, and the French Atlantic experience.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
- The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
- "Imperial Vineyards: Wine and Politics in the Early American South," in Patrick Griffin, ed., Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 50-70.
- "From the Desert to the Refuge: The Saga of New Bordeaux," French Historical Studies, 40:1 (2017), 1-28.
- "The Huguenot Refuge and European Imperialism," in Raymond A. Mentzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., The Companion to the Huguenots (Leiden: Brill Press, 2016), 394-421.
- "Between Eden and Empire: Huguenot Refugees and the Promise of New Worlds," American Historical Review, 118:5 (December 2013).
- The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2011)
- "Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations in Early America," in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
- “The Protestant Moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of 1688-89, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire,” in Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 481-508
- "Jesuits, Huguenots, and the Apocalypse: The Origins of America’s First French Book,” co-authored with Evan Haefeli, in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 116 (2006), 59-120
- “Captives and Slaves: Indian Labor, Cultural Conversion, and the Plantation Revolution in Virginia,” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 114 (2006), 435-62
- “Unlikely Imperialist: The Baron of Saint-Castin and the Transformation of the Northeastern Borderlands,” in French Colonial History, 5 (2004), 43-61