Ashli White earned a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She specializes in early American history, with particular attention to the connections between North America and the Atlantic World. To date, most of her research has concentrated on the political, social, and cultural history of the age of revolutions. Her most recent book, Revolutionary Things, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in spring 2023. This work examines the circulation of objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, and it analyzes how these things drew diverse actors into debates over freedom, equality, and solidarity, in uniquely visceral and provocative ways. In support of this project, White has received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. White’s first book, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), explores the far-reaching impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. It won the 2011 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut Français d’Amérique.
White’s interdisciplinary research interests inform her teaching and other academic pursuits at UM. She was Associate Curator of Antillean Visions: Maps and the Making of the Caribbean (Lowe Art Museum, February-May 2018), an exhibition that charted over 500 years of mapping the region. The exhibition’s multilingual catalog received the 2019 Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab Award (Category 2) from the American Library Association. White offers lecture courses on colonial North America, the American Revolution, and the early U.S. republic and seminars on comparative slavery, the Atlantic world, material culture, and cartography.
Education
| 2003 | Ph.D. , Columbia University |
Professional Experience
| - | Co-founder, Atlantic Studies Research Group |
Memberships
Member of Curatorial Team
U.S., Age of Revolutions
Publications
Ashli White Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press . June 2023). [Link]
Ashli White Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010). [Link]
