Professor Selected to Participate in Scholar’s Workshop

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OI) promotes scholars and their scholarship via publications, conferences, and fellowships. This July, Assistant Professor Megan Cherry was chosen as a participant in OI’s second annual Scholars Workshop in Williamsburg, Virginia.  

Cherry spent the first two weeks in intensive discussions and meetings with the OI’s editorial team working on her book, New York Asunder: Factional Politics in Colonial New York, 1689-1719. She explains the origins and consequences of Leisler’s Rebellion  – a popular political uprising which split New York into two factions that continued to divide the colony for three decades after Leisler’s execution.

Over the next two weeks Cherry focused on researching and writing at the College of William and Mary, where the Omohundro Institute is based, and visiting Colonial Williamsburg. 

Says Cherry, “I’m so grateful I was chosen as a participant in the Scholars Workshop.  The feedback I received from my colleagues there was invaluable and really helped me to think through challenges I’ve faced in my research.  I knew going in that the Workshop would be incredibly helpful, but I had no idea the people involved would be so friendly!  It was a great start to my sabbatical year.”

Professor Cherry’s research interests focus on the political, imperial, and social history of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  She was a Whiting Fellow at Yale, where she received her Ph.D. in History in 2013.  

Cherry teaches courses on colonial North America, the American Revolution, early America to 1865, the Atlantic world, the history of sexuality, and the foundation courses on historical methods for undergraduates and historical writing for graduate students. She has taught in the Department of History at North Carolina State University since 2011.

*Professor Cherry will be on leave for the 2016-2017 academic year.  She will be spending the year at the New-York Historical Society as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow while she works on her book.