Megan Lindsay Cherry
I am a sixth-year graduate student under the direction of Steven Pincus, John Demos, and Julia Adams. My dissertation is a history of Leisler's Rebellion (1689-1691) in colonial New York. My work seeks to explain why the majority of colonists in New York joined the rebellion, and why the political legacies of the rebellion continued to shape New York politics for decades after it ended. I argue that New Yorkers rebelled against their government for ideological and political reasons, and place the uprising in an Atlantic context by showing its connections with English and Dutch politics.
My research has received support from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Historical Research, the Fox International Fellowship Program, the Beinecke Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. My first article, "The Imperial and Political Motivations Behind the English Conquest of New Netherland", was published in March 2010 in the journal Dutch Crossing.
My teaching interests include North American colonial history, the Atlantic World, early modern English and European history, and U.S. history to 1877, among other topics. I have been a teaching fellow for courses on early African-American history, Africa in the era of the slave trade, North American colonial history, and the American Revolution.
