Symposium: New Insights on Isaiah Thomas

Joseph M. Adelman is professor of history at Framingham State University and associate editor of The New England Quarterly. A historian of media, communication, and politics in the Atlantic world, in 2019 he published his first book, entitled Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 with the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book was awarded an honorable mention for the 2019 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America.  He has presented and published broadly, including in the journals Enterprise & Society and Early American Studies, Slate, TheAtlantic.com, the Washington Post, and as a blogger at the Junto. . Adelman is an elected member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.  At AAS he was a Stephen Botein Fellow in 2007-08 and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 2011-12. He was elected to membership in October 2019.

Curator of Manuscripts Ashley Cataldo is responsible for selecting, cataloging, and making accessible the AAS's collection of diaries, correspondence, and other papers.  She holds an MA in English from Clark University, where she has also pursued graduate work toward a PhD in history. Cataldo has published articles on early American bookbinding, presented on seventeenth-century manuscript culture, and is interested in the intersection of information studies and the environmental humanities.

Jennifer Y. Chuong is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research centers on the art and material culture of the eighteenth-century British transatlantic world, with particular attention to the ways in which artists think with materials and technical processes. Currently, Chuong is working on a book manuscript, “Surface Experiments: Art, Nature, and the Making of British America,” which recovers the artistic, scientific, and philosophical fascination with surfaces as sites of physical transformation in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Recent publications include a co-edited special issue of Journal18 on the topic of “craft” and an article on the engraved portrait of the African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley. 

John Garcia is the director of scholarly programs and partnerships. He oversees the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC) and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) and is responsible for building relationships between AAS, scholars, organizations, and institutions. He served as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and is on the editorial board of Commonplace: the journal of early American life. His research has been supported by fellowships from AAS, Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the New York Public Library, and the Ford Foundation. He has published essays on a variety of topics related to the history of the book and early American literature.

Jim Green is librarian emeritus of the Library Company of Philadelphia. He is the author of several essays on the colonial and early national book trades for the first two volumes of the collaborative History of the Book in America, published by the American Antiquarian Society (2000-2010); and he is co-author, with Peter Stallybrass, of Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer (2006).  He has taught several courses over the years at Rare Book School, and lately he has enjoyed co-teaching, with John Pollack, a course in the history of the book in America at the University of Pennsylvania.  At AAS, Green was an Albert Boni Fellow in 1986-87 and a Stephen Botein Fellow in 1989-90.  He was elected to membership in October 1994. 

Christen Mucher, associate professor of American Studies at Smith College, specializes in early North American narratives about the past, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and hemispheric studies. Her monograph, Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession was published in 2022  and her co-edited volume Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America came out in 2021. She is co-editor and co-translator of the first Haitian novel, Stella: a Novel of the Haitian Revolution (2015) by Émeric Bergeaud.  At AAS Mucher was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 2015-16 and was elected to membership in October 2023. 

Grant Stanton is an assistant professor of history and Africana studies at Drew University. His research interests range widely across the landscape of early American (pre-1865) and Atlantic history, with a focus on the contributions Black actors made to the creation of the modern world.  Stanton's work has been accepted for publication in Early American Studies, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Slavery, Law, and Power Project, Early American Studies Miscellany, and the Magazine of Early American Datasets.  His book manuscript studies the birth of formal Black politics in the American Revolution, including the central role Black colonists in Massachusetts played in leading the first organized, interracial, and successful abolition movement in American history.  At AAS, Stanton was a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow in 2023-24.