Dr. Samantha Seeley
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Profile
Samantha Seeley is an Associate Professor of History at University of Richmond, where she specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century North America and the early United States.
Her first book, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, recasts the nation’s origin story by investigating the roots of removal in the United States. The book examines why legislators, state and federal officials, reformers, intellectuals, and ordinary people pitched removal as a solution to the unresolved “problems” of the American Revolution — land hunger, war debts, and slavery and emancipation. These early proposals aimed at removing Indigenous people and African Americans from the states and the nation became the precursors to the better-known projects of Jacksonian Indian removal and Liberian colonization. In the years after the American Revolution, people claimed a dual set of rights — the right to remain and the right to remove others — that would define the borders of belonging in the early United States.
Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain won the 2021 Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social history from the Organization of American Historians as well as the 2021 Jon Gjerde Prize for the best book in Midwestern history from the Midwestern History Association. The book also received honorable mention for the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American History.
Samantha is currently working on two new projects on race and the history of migration. Her second book project, Bound by Treaty: Emancipation and Diplomacy in the Age of Revolutions, shows how enslaved people and Indigenous, British, Spanish and U.S. participants in treaty-making used formal diplomacy to debate emancipation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also working on a second project on climate, migration, and Indigenous dispossession in the Year without Summer of 1816.
At University of Richmond, Samantha teaches survey courses on the American Revolution, the early United States, slavery and freedom, and U.S. empire, as well as upper-level seminars on the Atlantic World, historiography, and public history. She is always eager to work with students on summer research and thesis projects.
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Grants and Fellowships
American Antiquarian Society/NEH Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2022-2023
John W. Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress, 2018-2019
Washington Library Fellowship, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, 2018
Gilder Lehrman Center Fellowship, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, 2017
Lloyd Lewis/NEH Fellowship, Newberry Library, 2016
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Awards
2022 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians, for Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
Honorable mention, 2022 James A Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians, for Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
2021 Jon Gjerde Prize, Midwestern History Association, for Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
Runner-up, Dissertation Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2015
Finalist, Louis Pelzer Memorial Award, Organization of American Historians, 2014
Bessie and George Levy Prize for Excellence in American History, New York University, 2012
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Presentations
Recent Conference Presentations
“Race, Geography, and the Power of Comparison,” Roundtable on New Histories of Race-Making in Slavery and Freedom, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
“Dispossession in Indigenous and Immigration Histories,” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, 2023 (paper read in absentia)
Chair and Commentor, “Slavery and the Law: New Histories of American Immigration,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
The “Spirit of Emigration”: Climate and Dispossession in the Early Nineteenth Century, Western Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, 2022
Roundtable on “The Africanist Presence in Early America,” Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Atlanta, GA, 2021
Recent Seminars and Invited Talks
“Bound by Treaty: Emancipation and Diplomacy in Early North America,” Fellows Seminar, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, 2023
“Bound by Treaty: Captivity and Slavery in the Northern Borderlands,” Institute of Historical Research North American History Seminar (virtual), School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK, 2023
Book Talk, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain, “Book Breaks” virtual series hosted by Gilder Lehrman Institute, Columbia University, 2023
Book Talk, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain, NEH-funded “Scranton’s Story” series, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA, 2022
“Bound by Treaty: Emancipation and Diplomacy in the Northern Borderlands,” New York University Atlantic World Workshop, New York, NY, 2022
Book Talk, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain, Papers of Andrew Jackson and History Department, University of Tennessee webinar series, 2022
Book Talk, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain, Omohundro Institute Virtual Books Conversation with Michael Witgen, 2021
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Grants and Fellowships
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Publications
Books
Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the Early United States (The Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
Journal Articles"Freedom and the Politics of Migration after the Revolution," in Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Revolutions: African American Politics and U. S. History from the First to the Second Civil War, ed. David Waldstreicher and Van Gosse (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
"Beyond the American Colonization Society," History Compass 14 (March 2016): 93-104.
Co-editor, "The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive," special issue of Social Text 33 (Winter 2015)