Seeley's Early American History Research Supported by Two Fellowships

Dr. Samantha Seeley, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Richmond, has received two awards to support work on her book manuscript, “Race and Removal in the Early American Republic.” Support during the fall 2016 semester will be provided by a five-month Lloyd Lewis Fellowship in History from the Newberry Library in Chicago.  During the spring 2017 semester, Dr. Seeley will be supported by a four-month fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

Dr. Seeley’s book will examine overlapping forced migrations of free people across the Mid-Atlantic, Upper South and Ohio Valley in the half-century after the American Revolution. Her work reveals that post-Revolutionary removal laws and treaties served as the testing grounds for later removal projects in the antebellum U.S., such as the well-documented cases of Jacksonian Indian removal or Liberian colonization. She argues that the right to remain lay at the crux of the definition of post-revolutionary freedom, and that freedom of movement included the power to remain in place as well as the power to relocate others.

Dr. Seeley has taught at the University of Richmond since 2014, after completing her B.A. in History at Brown University and her Ph.D. in Early American History at New York University