Charles Prior
School of History and Cultures | College of Arts and Law
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I grew up on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee lands near Kingston, Ontario Canada, and taught at Queen’s University (Canada), the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge, where I held a postdoctoral fellowship from 2004 to 2006. I am a life member of Wolfson College, Cambridge and held visiting appointments in Canada, the United States and in the UK. Before coming to Birmingham, I was Professor of History at the University of Hull.
Within the Group, I am Co-I and CL on two large collaborative projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom: ‘Brightening the Covenant Chain’, which concludes in 2025, and ‘Historic Houses, Global Crossroads’, a 36 month project that began in September 2024.
My research focus is on treaties as instances of cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty. With support from a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2017-18), I completed Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America (Cambridge University Press, 2020). It foregrounds Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and power to refine the place of settler colonialism in American colonial and early republican history. This became the core of a second book, Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty in the American Northeast. Placing the Covenant Chain relationship between the Haudenosaunee and the British Crown at its centre, the book argues that treaties defined a rules-based system of interaction in the international locales of Northeastern North America. My Latest project, supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2024-27) is ‘Treatied States of America: Interior Diplomacy and the Contest for (Native) American Resources’. Through fresh research in a range of archives, this project will provide a new interpretation of Native American treaties that focusses on the legal foundations and ongoing disputes over resources.
Recent publications
‘Back to Ka-ou-enesegoan‘, Queen’s Quarterly 130 n. 3 (Fall, 2023).
Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America, Cambridge Elements in Comparative Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2020). I gave an overview of the book in an interview on the New Diplomatic History Podcast.
‘Indian Centres, Colonial Peripheries: Locating the International in Early America’, in Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Rachel Herrmann & Jessica Roney (9500 words). Forthcoming.
‘Beyond Settler Colonialism: State Sovereignty in Early America’. Journal of Early American History 9 n. 2&3 (2019), 93-117.
‘Settlers Among Empires: Conquest and the American Revolution’, in Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti, ed. Edward Vallance (Routledge, 2018), 79-93.
Recent talks
‘Britons in Iroquoia’, Global Georgians: Transnational Interactions with the British Monarchy, King’s College, London, 8 June 2021. Plenary roundtable with David Armitage (Harvard), Priya Atwal (KCL), Henrietta Harrison (Oxford).
‘Thinking Around Treaties’, Omohundro Institute, College of William and Mary, Virginia 27 July – 31 August 2021 (online)
‘Indian Centers, Colonial Peripheries’, Lines on a Map: Crafting and Contesting Borders in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond, British Library, London, 13-14 December 2019.
