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
Current and upcoming courses
First-Year Seminar: American Hauntings
HIST114Y
The American past is crowded with ghosts. In this seminar, we will trace the evolution of supernatural belief in America and analyze some of its most famous ghost stories. What about the nation’s history makes it such fertile terrain for ghosts? What happens when the dead refuse to stay in the past, relegated to history? Why, in short, is the American historical imagination so haunted? We’ll dig deeply into selected hauntings, drawn from across historical North America, and encounter the spirits of French Detroit, the Gettysburg battlefield, and colonial Jamaica, among others.
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Pursuits of Happiness: America in the Age of Revolution
HIST260
Investigates the origins and aftermath of one of the most improbable events in American history: the American Revolution. What pushed colonists to rebel, rather suddenly, against Britain? And what social struggles followed in the war's wake? We will explore the experiences of ordinary Americans, including women and slaves; examine the material culture of Revolutionary America; trace the intellectual histories of the founders; and witness the creation of a national identity and constitution. Those who lived through the rebellion left behind plenty of material: letters; pamphlets; teapots; runaway slave advertisements; diaries. We will consider these and more. Visits to Boston historic sites will take you back in time and space to the besieged, volatile city that led the colonies into war.