Since earning her doctoral degree from the UNC History Department in 2007, Dr. Christina Snyder has established herself as a leading historian of North American race, colonialism, and slavery from pre-contact through the nineteenth century. She is currently the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, a position she has held since July of 2017. Dr. Snyder has also written two well-received monographs and co-authored a two-volume textbook of US History.
Upon graduating from UNC, Dr. Snyder received a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, where she devoted much time to developing her dissertation into a book manuscript. She especially benefited from the diversity of scholars at the McNeil Center.
“At that time, there weren’t many people doing Native American studies there,” Dr. Snyder said. “That helped me think a lot about audience.”
By 2009, Dr. Snyder completed her manuscript, and a year later Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010) was published. The book won several major prizes, including the James Broussard Best First Book Prize and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. It continues to be assigned consistently in graduate courses on Early America.
“It was published really quickly,” Dr. Snyder said, “and I think that a lot of that came from the structure of the dissertation that I developed at UNC.”
Indeed, Dr. Snyder emphasized the strong mentoring she received from her co-advisors, Dr. Michael Green and Dr. Theda Perdue, as a major reason for the quick transition from dissertation to book.
“I found it to be a really supportive environment and I got a lot of hands-on mentoring,” Dr. Snyder said. “They were already helping me think about how to structure the dissertation so it could become a book.”
Her dissertation committee as a whole, which included Dr. Kathleen DuVal and Dr. Harry Watson from the History Department as well as Dr. Vin Steponaitis from the Anthropology Department, provided valuable insights that influenced Dr. Snyder’s work on Slavery in Indian Country. She noted, in particular, the value of her dissertation defense in guiding her work at the McNeil Center.
“I had all these experts from different fields providing feedback,” Dr. Snyder said. “They could all give me ideas for the book.”
After completing her work at the McNeil Center, Dr. Snyder taught at Indiana University for eight years, where she devoted much time to her second book, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2017).
The book centers on Great Crossings in Kentucky, the site of a federal Indian school that brought white, black and Indian people into close proximity, fueling complex racial and class interactions. The project emerged from her research on Slavery in Indian Country.
“When I was doing my first book, I ran across a letter by Peter Pitchlynn. He was a student at Choctaw Academy,” Dr. Snyder said. “The letter described the conflicts he had been having with enslaved people, who had been enslaved to work in the dining hall at the school, and it basically captured this clash over class and race in the 1820s.”
Like her first book, Great Crossings was met with much praise. It received this year’s Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for its contributions to American history and its literary merit.
With her second book published, Dr. Snyder has begun research for her newest project, Slavery after the Civil War: The Slow Death and Many Afterlives of Bondage. The project has grown out of her interactions with other scholars at conferences on the global history of slavery, a topic gaining attention in the historical literature.
“That story is really not confined to the antebellum South anymore. This was something practiced all across the continent,” Dr. Snyder said, describing bondage in such diverse places as California, Hawaii, and Alaska. “I thought one way to unite these different stories would be to look at abolition, basically thinking about emancipation as a Civil War-era policy that the US carried into the West and overseas, partially to justify colonization.”
In addition to her individual research, Dr. Snyder has coauthored a two-volume textbook American Horizons: US History in a Global Context, 3rd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2018), which covers American history from pre-contact to the present.
“So many of our projects are intensely individualized,” Dr. Snyder said. “This was kind of fun because I got to work closely with a group of people that I like.”
Although Dr. Snyder has accomplished much since her time at UNC, she continues to take pride in the History Department, noting in particular its leading role in advocating for the removal of the “Silent Sam” monument.
“UNC has served me really well, and I continue to be proud of the actions of the History Department,” Dr. Snyder said. “I have continued to admire the scholarship and activism of students, alums, and professors in the Department.”