Bridgett Williams-Searle

Associate Professor

History & Political Science Department

Professor Bridgett Williams-Searle received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, where she was the director of the History Teaching and Writing Center. She currently offers courses on US to 1865; Gender, Race and Empire in British North America; American Indian history; Environmental history; the American Revolution; and the Early National Period. She also is faculty advisor for the Alpha Lambda Omega chapter of the national history honors society, Phi Alpha Theta.

Her current research centers on the ways in which household relations of power structured the political economy and multi-cultural social relations of the Old Northwest. She is also interested in violence and state formation in revolutionary societies, and the transition from slavery to freedom in post-revolutionary America. Her 2006 dissertation, Resolving the Revolution: Intimate Empires, Property Relations, and Law in the Early Republic won the Westerners International Dissertation Prize awarded to the best dissertation on US western history.

Professor Williams-Searle recently co-edited a state-of-the-field essay collection on African-American emancipation, migration, and citizenship in North America titled Freedom on the Margins, which appeared as a issue of Citizenship Studies. She is now revising her dissertation into a book manuscript. She also has won many grants and fellowships, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Women's Studies Grant, the Indiana Historical Society Dissertation Fellowship, and the College of St. Rose Scholars and Artists Grant.

Professor Williams-Searle is active in a variety of professional associations, including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Society for the History of the Early Republic, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. She is a member of the American Association of University Professors.