Research Interests

Evan Haefeli joined Texas A&M University in 2014, after teaching at Columbia, Tufts, and Princeton Universities and the London School of Economics, where he was a Visiting Fellow. He has held fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the NEH; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library. His research has ranged from the frontier between New France and New England, to early Native American history, the famous Salem witchcraft trials, obscure revolts in colonial New York, captivity narratives and the nature of book publishing in colonial America, and the politics of religious toleration in the Dutch empire, especially New Netherland. He is currently finishing a book for the University of Chicago Press on the politics of religious toleration and English overseas expansion from 1497-1688, editing a volume of essays entitled Anti-Catholicism: The Anglo-American Experience c. 1600-1850, and beginning his next book. Examining the radical origins of the English Bahamas in the seventeenth century, the book will explore the impact of the English Revolution on the Atlantic World, including puritanism, early anti-slavery sentiment, shipwreck, pirates, and more.

Publications

Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1492-1662 (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism (University of Virginia Press, 2020)