University of Richmond professor Samantha Seeley receives two fellowships to support American history research

Samantha Seeley, assistant professor of history at University of Richmond, has received two awards to support research for her book “Race and Removal in the Early American Republic.”

Seeley will be supported this fall by a five-month Lloyd Lewis Fellowship in history from the Newberry Library in Chicago.  Next spring Seeley will receive support from a four-month fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. The two grants total about $35,000.

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.

“My work reveals that post-revolutionary removal laws and treaties served as the testing grounds for later removal projects in the antebellum United States, such as the well-documented cases of Jacksonian Indian removal or Liberian colonization,” Seeley said. “Freedom of movement included the power to remain in place as well as the power to relocate others.”

Seeley has taught at the University of Richmond since 2014. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in early American history from New York University. 

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