Associate Professor of History, on leave for the 2023–2024 academic year
Strother Roberts is a historian of the environment and economy of early modern North America whose research focuses on the indigenous and Euro-American communities of New England from the age of encounters through the era of the Early Republic. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Henry E. Huntington Library, and has appeared in journals such as Ethnohistory, The New England Quarterly, Agricultural History, and Northeastern Naturalist. He recently published his first book, Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, with the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book focuses on the Connecticut River Valley – New England’s longest river and largest watershed – to explore how the participation of Native nations and English settlers in local, regional, and trans-Atlantic markets for colonial commodities transformed the physical environment in one corner of a rapidly globalizing early modern world. He is currently working on his second book, a history of European and indigenous dogs in early New England and New France.
