A. LYNN SMITH, PH.D.
Dr. Andrea Lynn Smith is a historical anthropologist whose research explores settler colonialism, memory and forgetting, colonialism and place-loss. She is professor of anthropology at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. Her new book, Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779, contrasts the official story of a Revolutionary War expedition with that told by Seneca and other Native American leaders and at Haudenosaunee cultural centers.
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Dr. A. Lynn Smith is a historical anthropologist whose research explores settler colonialism, memory and forgetting, colonialism and place-loss. Her new book, Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779, contrasts the official story of a Revolutionary War expedition with that told by Seneca and other Native American leaders and at Haudenosaunee cultural centers.
Previous publications consider colonial nostalgia with the award-winning Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France (2006); the silencing of Native and Latino voices in local history museums in the American southwest; and the role of place-loss in community identities in the aftermath of forced removal in Rebuilding Shattered Worlds: Creating Community by Voicing the Past (2016). Dr. Smith is professor of anthropology at Lafayette College, Easton, PA.
She is also the author, co-author, or editor of: Messy Europe: Racialization and Crisis in a Postcolonial World (2018); Europe’s Invisible Migrants (2003); and Teaching the Isms: Feminist Pedagogy across the Disciplines (2010).
Smith is the recipient of many honors, awards, grants, and fellowships, including National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Excellence in Community Engagement Pedagogy Award, Richard King Mellon Research Fellowship.
“A. Lynn Smith demonstrates the power of combining history and ethnography in the study of historical consciousness. At once a history of commemoration and an ethnography of remembrance, the book illuminates long, tangled histories of both settler and Native understandings of events at the heart of the American origin story.”
—Geoffrey M. White, author of Memorializing Pearl Harbor: Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance
“A. Lynn Smith’s Memory Wars is a skillful case study exploring how various forces have shaped interpretations of America’s past....Through its use of a wide range of sources and approaches, Memory Wars provides an excellent study of how divergent and complex forces have shaped public perception, memory, and the commemoration of a major historical event."
“Important and timely. Memory Wars is relevant to public historians, museum professionals, and others who study, create, and dismantle narratives consumed by the public at interpretive sites. It makes a contribution to early American history by challenging the interpretations of the Sullivan Expedition and its commemoration and the erasure of intra-settler conflicts. Finally, the research makes a significant contribution to Native American history.”
—Dawn G. Marsh, author of A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman
Upcoming & Recent Events
Dr. A. Lynn Smith is available for public speaking engagements about a variety of topics related to her research and scholarship.