John Wood Sweet

Associate Professor & Assistant Department Chair of History (3291); Assistant Department Chair of Women’s Studies (3283)

520 Hamilton Hall
Campus Box 3195
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195
919-962-3945 (phone)
sweet@unc.edu

M.A. (History), Princeton University 1990
Ph.D. (History), Princeton University 1995

Research Interests

Within the general field of Early American history, my research focuses on the dynamics of colonialism and on the interplay of religious cultures. In Bodies Politic I explore the encounters of Indians, Africans, and Europeans in New England and argue that the racial legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the American North as well as the South. I’ve also worked with other historians and literary scholars on the Jamestown colony and its broader cultural and international contexts. Now, I’m beginning a new project on dreams, visions, apparitions, trances, and other out-of-body experiences-and how various groups of early Americans interpreted them.

On the web you can also see two slide essays on Capt. John Smith’s Map of Virginia (1624)–the “Susquehannock Bowman” and “Powhatan as Emperor”–and a short piece on interviewing for academic jobs.