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Swinehart, Kirk Davis


Assistant Professor of History
History Department
860.685.2077
Public Affairs Center 414

Faculty Fellow (fall)
Center for the Humanities
860.685.3062
Center for the Humanities 206


BA Miami University Oxford
MA University of Delaware
MA Yale University
MPHIL Yale University
PHD Yale University
EMAIL:
kswinehart@wesleyan.edu
WESLEYAN PO BOX:
 History Department
COURSES TAUGHT THIS SEMESTER:
CHUM306 - 01
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Kirk Davis Swinehart, formerly the Mellon Research Fellow in American History at Cambridge University, studied at the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and at Yale. An expert in American furniture and decorative arts, he nearly pursued a career at one of New York's auction houses.

Swinehart is completing a book about the New World soldier-adventurer Sir William Johnson and his feuding families, Irish and Mohawk, both of which fought for Britain during the American Revolution. Among other things, the book chronicles Johnson's twenty-year relationship with a Mohawk woman--Molly Brant--and her struggle to maintain the Mohawks' alliance with George III.

"Mourning War" will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Swinehart is the recipient of a Yale College Teaching Prize and of fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Huntington Library, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting and Andrew W. Mellon foundations.

In 2005-2006, Swinehart held the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the New York Public Library's Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

He writes regularly about books for the Chicago Tribune.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE:
Exploration and colonization; British North America; the American Revolution; Native American history; the history of warfare; material culture; biography and narrative nonfiction.
OFFICE HOURS:
Fall 2009: Monday 4-5 in CHUMS 206