Katherine Grandjean
Associate Professor of History
Historian of early American and Native American history, English colonialism and cultural encounters, environmental history, and violence in American history.
Katherine Grandjean is a historian of early America. She writes about colonialism, violence, the environment, and the American Revolution. Her first book, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Her newest book, Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution (Random House, 2026), investigates a long-forgotten series of murders in Appalachia and unearths hidden, violent legacies of the American Revolution.
Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and American Antiquarian Society, and has appeared in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, New England Quarterly, and Early American Studies. Her essay, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War,” won the American Society for Environmental History's 2012 Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article and the William and Mary Quarterly’s 2014 Douglass Adair Memorial Award.
She has lately been thinking most about the long shadow of the American Revolution, for those who lived through it. You can read some of her findings in recent articles: “Betsey Shelton’s Sampler: A Loyalist’s Daughter and the Intimate Legacies of the American Revolution” and “Pockets Full of Ashes: The Lingering Embers of the Revolutionary War in the South.”
At Wellesley, Professor Grandjean teaches courses on colonial and Revolutionary American history, Native American history, the history of American food, and early American crime and punishment.
COURSES
HIST114 First Year Seminar: American Hauntings
HIST203 Out of Many: American History to 1877
HIST223 The Hand that Feeds: A History of American Food
HIST253 First Peoples: An Introduction to Native American History
HIST256 Brave New Worlds: Colonial American History and Culture
HIST260 Pursuits of Happiness: America in the Age of Revolution
HIST262 The Life and Political World of Alexander Hamilton
HIST320 Seminar: The Hand that Feeds: A History of American Food
HIST321 Seminar: Convicted: Crime and Punishment in Early America
Education
- B.A., Yale University
- Ph.D., Harvard University