Program Faculty
Daniel K. Richter is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research and teaching focus on colonial America and Native Americans before 1800. His second book, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard, 2001) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.
Daniel K. Richter earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League on the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina, 1992) and Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard, 2001). He is co-editor, with James H. Merrell, of Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800 (1987) and, with William A. Pencak, of Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Colonists, Indians, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (2004).
Michael W. Zuckerman is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is the author of Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's First Plural Societies (Temple, 1982) and Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (University of California, 1993).
Michael W. Zuckerman has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and has participated in summer teacher institutes for the National Constitution Center, SHEAR, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program.
C. Dallett Hemphill is Professor of History at Ursinus College. She is currently completing a study of sibling relations in early America and her research and teaching focus on women’s history, family history, and the history of Philadelphia.
C. Dallett Hemphill earned her Ph.D. from Brandeis University and is the author of Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America (Oxford, 2004) as well as several articles in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly and Journal of Social History.
Laura Keenan Spero is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the history of early America, Native America, and women and gender. She is currently completing a dissertation on the history of the Shawnees.
Laura Keenan Spero recently published “Reconstructing Rachel” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography based on her archival research on Rachel Francisco, a free black woman accused of infanticide in Delaware. She has also worked as Program Administrator for NEH Landmarks Workshops at the National Constitution Center in 2006 and is a McNeil Center for Early American Studies research fellow.
Tamara Gaskell Miller is director of publications and editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and Pennsylvania Legacies. She has also served as assistant editor of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers project, a documentary editing project based at Rutgers University, and worked as a reference librarian and as editor of the publications of the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis.
Tamara Gaskell Miller received a B.A. in American Studies from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University, with concentrations in early American history, social history, and women’s history. Her dissertation, “‘Seeking to Strengthen the Ties of Friendship’: Women and Community in Southeastern Ohio, 1788–1850,” examines the role of women in the building of community on the trans-Appalachian frontier.
