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 early 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.
His early work focused on transatlantic religious and political history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including one book on how fears of "popery" galvanized English colonists in the late-1600s, and another tracing the global peregrinations of French Protestant (Huguenot) refugees, who became bit players in dozens of imperial projects. More recently his interests have turned to the early period of exploration and colonization and toward the American interior. His forthcoming book, The Imagined Continent: Explorers and Storytellers in Early North America, examines how extravagant tales of lost Native kingdoms in the heart of America influenced colonization from the sixteenth century through the era of the Revolution.
His teaching ranges from colonial and revolutionary America to early modern Europe, including such topics as European-Native relations, the settlement of Boston and New England, the history of Jesuits in North America, and the French Atlantic experience.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
"In Search of the Mer de l'Ouest: The Pacific Northwest in the French Historical Imagination," Pacific Historical Review, 95 (2026).
"The Mysteries of Apalache: Tall Tales and Lost Worlds in the Early American South," Huntington Library Quarterly, 88 (2025).
The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020).
"From the Desert to the Refuge: The Saga of New Bordeaux," French Historical Studies, 40 (2017).
"Between Eden and Empire: Huguenot Refugees and the Promise of New Worlds," American Historical Review, 118 (2013).
The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
"The Protestant Moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of 1688-89, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire," Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007).