RESEARCH
My research explores settler colonialism, memory and forgetting, colonialism, and place-loss. My first contribution to colonial studies was an article promoting the study of settler communities (“Colonialism and the Poisoning of Europe: Towards an Anthropology of Colonists,” Journal of Anthropological Research (1994)). A conference I organized at New York University in 1999 culminated in the edited volume, Europe’s Invisible Migrants (2003; Amsterdam University Press). I have worked with several settler communities (see below).
My 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.
Please click on the links below to explore each research area.
SETTLER MEMORY
French Settlers of Algeria
French Algeria attracted immigrants from Spain, Italy and Malta as well as France. They became French citizens in Algeria, and they or their descendants “returned” to France at decolonization in 1962. The Maltese, as the poorest of these immigrants and speaking a language mutually intelligible with the local North African idiom, were viewed as a curious in-between population, neither “European” nor “African.”
Remembering Washington’s Indian Expedition
Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779 explores the public memory of the “Sullivan Expedition,” an expedition that led to the destruction of some forty Indigenous villages.
Mormons in Arizona
I applied insights developed with French Algerian studies to a consideration of settlers of Arizona. In 2003-4, I conducted research among descendants of early Mormon families in Arizona and studied public history-making, advancing a study of “settler colonial historical consciousness.
PLACE-LOSS
Place-Loss in Easton, Pennsylvania
“Syrian Town” was a multiethnic neighborhood at the heart of Easton that was completely demolished with 1960s urban renewal projects. Composed of Lebanese-, Italian-, Anglo- and African-American residents in roughly equal proportions, it lives on in the memories of its former residents.