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Scribner CV September 2023

Dr. Scribner’s research investigates early American history in a global context, specifically striving to understand how early modern Britons sought to define (and redefine) their positions in the empire. His first book, Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society (NYU Press, 2019), analyzes early Americans’ mercurial attempts at realizing a “civil society” through the lens of the urban tavern. His second book, Merpeople: A Human History (Reaktion Books, 2020) uses humanity’s long-held obsession with merpeople to gain a deeper understanding of one of the most mysterious, capricious, and dangerous creatures on earth: humans. He is currently at work on his third book—Under Alien Skies: The Climate of War in Revolutionary America—which will be the first monograph-length environmental history of the American Revolution.
Dr. Scribner’s publications range from an investigation of how colonists used mineral springs to transform the natural environment to an analysis of Caribbean sugar plantation slavery to a biographical study of Prince William Henry, the first British royal to set foot in America, and have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Early American Studies, the Journal of Social History, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Urban History, Itinerario, Agricultural History, the Journal of Early American History, and the edited volumes, Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake and A Cultural History of Leisure in the Enlightenment.

Dr. Scribner believes that teaching and research are inherently connected pursuits, and uses his diverse research interests to offer courses on colonial America, revolutionary America, the Atlantic slave trade, the early modern Atlantic world, and the methods course. He is also passionate about public outreach and service.