Linford Fisher
Assistant Professor of History:
History
Phone: +1 401 863 6208
Linford_Fisher@brown.edu
Professor Fisher's fields of research are colonial America, American Indians (especially the contact period through the end of the eighteenth century), and the history of religion in America. His current research centers on the religious and cultural history of Native Americans in eighteenth-century New England. He is interested in the processes of long-term cultural and religious change.
Biography
Linford grew up in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008. In 2008-2009 he was an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University--South Bend. He joined the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. Linford's research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of early America.
Interests
Linford's current book project, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (under contract with Oxford), looks at Native American communities in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island (NY), over the long course of the 18th century, particularly with regard to their involvement in the so-called "Great Awakening" of the 1740s. Using a variety of court documents, land deeds, letters, and church records, he traces the selective adoption of Christian ideas and practices by Native individuals prior to and during the Great Awakening, and the subsequent emergence, post-awakening, of a distinct Indian separatism and partial rejection of Anglo-American religious institutions in response to a growing proto-racism.
His next book-length project will look at the history of slavery and the shades of servitude in colonial New England among Africans and Native Americans.
Affiliations
American Historical Association
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
American Society for Ethnohistory
American Academy of Religion
American Society of Church History
Teaching
Linford teaches courses in the field of early American history, focusing especially on the religious history of the colonial period and the history of American Indians. His courses at Brown include:
History 1975T: Colonial Encounters: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of Early America
History 1800: History of Religion in America, 1600-1865 (spring 2010)
History 0970A: Object Histories: The Material Culture of Early America (spring 2010)
Funded Research
Massachusetts Historical Society NEH Long-Term Fellowship (2010-2011)
American Philosophical Society, Phillips Fund for Native American Research (2007-2008)
American Antiquarian Society, Peterson Fellowship (2007-2008)
William R. Hutchison Doctoral Fellowship, Harvard University (2006-2007)
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Research Fellowship (2006-2007)
Curriculum Vitae
