Department ofHistory

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Christina Snyder

Christina Snyder

McCabe Greer Professor of History

210 Weaver Building

University Park, PA 16802

Phone: (814) 863-0181

Education:

PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007
MA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004
AB, University of Georgia, 2001
Christina Snyder Headshot

Biography:

 

Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer Professor of the American Civil War Era at The Pennsylvania State University. She is an historian of colonialism, race, and slavery, with a focus on North America from the pre-contact era through the late nineteenth century. Snyder earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Snyder is the author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010). These books received a wide range of accolades, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize, and the John C. Ewers Prize.

Professor Snyder also enjoys collaborative projects. Along with Michael Schaller, Janette Thomas Greenwood, Andrew Kirk, Sarah J. Purcell, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, she co-authors the textbook American Horizons: US History in a Global Context, now in its fourth edition with Oxford University Press. She co-edits, with Thomas G. Andrews, Ari Kelman, Amy Lonetree, and Mary E. Mendoza, the University of Nebraska Press book series Many Wests and hosts the associated McCabe Greer Manuscript Workshop at Penn State.

Additionally, Snyder is the author of more than twenty-five articles and review essays. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center.

 

Recent Publications:

  • “Many Removals: Re-Evaluating the Arc of Indigenous Dispossession,” Journal of the Early Republic 41 (2021): 623-650.
  • “The Once and Future Moundbuilders,” Southern Cultures 26 (Summer 2020): 98-118.
  • Co-Authored with Kate Shuster, Hasan K. Jeffries, Meredith L. McCoy, Margaret Newell, Sarah B. Shear, and Ebony E. Thomas. Teaching Hard History: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery—Grades K-5. Montgomery: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019, https://www.tolerance.org/frameworks/teaching-hard-history/american-slavery/k-5-framework
  • Co-Authored with Kate Shuster, Renée Gokey, Bethany Jay, Hasan K. Jeffries, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Meredith L. McCoy, and Sarah B. Shear. Teaching Hard History: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery—Grades 6-12. Montgomery: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019, https://www.tolerance.org/frameworks/teaching-hard-history/american-slavery/6-12-framework
  • Co-authored with Theda Perdue, “The Native South,” in Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2019), 415-444.
  • “Native American Slavery in Global Context,” in What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective ed. Catherine Cameron and Noel Lenski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 169-190.
  • “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture during the Removal Era,” Journal of American History 104 (September 2017): 386-409.
  • Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Son: Native Captives and American Empire,” in The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 84-106.
  • “Maroon Fort,” in Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory, featuring photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein and edited by Alex Lichtenstein (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017).
  • “The South,” in in Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 315-334.
  • “Native Nations in the Age of Revolution,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 77-94.
  • Indian Slavery,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. John Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
  • “The Long History of American Slavery,” in the OAH Magazine of History 27(October 2013): 23-27.
  • Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Awards and Service:

John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association, 2019.

John Hope Franklin Fellowship, National Humanities Center, 2019-2020.

Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians, 2018.

History of Education Outstanding Book Prize, History of Education Society, 2018.

OAH Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2015-2018

Kate B. & Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2013

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, 2011-2012

Visiting Fellow, University of California at Davis Humanities Institute, 2011-2012

John C. Ewers Prize, Western History Association, 2012

Finalist, Frederick Douglass Prize, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, 2011

Honorable Mention, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, 2011

Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, 2010

James H. Broussard Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2010

Barra/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2007-09

 

Areas of Specialization: