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About Me

Carolyn Eastman is professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the fields of the cultural and intellectual history of early America and the Atlantic world, political culture, the Revolution, gender, and the history of print, oral, and visual media. Her research has been funded by more than twenty competitive international grants and fellowships, including the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, and Virginia Humanities. She is the author of the prizewinning A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009), as well as a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles; her The Strange Genius of Mr. O: Celebrity and the Invention of the United States appeared in March 2021 from OI/ University of North Carolina Press.

Recent Publications

The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity (OI/ University of North Carolina Press, 2021)

A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

“Gender in the Early Republic: The Scholarship of Jan Ellen Lewis,” in Family, Love, and Race in the Early American Republic: The Historical Writing of Jan Ellen Lewis, eds. Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/ UNC Press, 2021.

“Prologue: The Fever that Struck New York,” Smithsonian Magazine 51, no. 10 (March 2021): 14-18: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fever-struck-new-york-180976997/.

“‘The powers of debate should be sedulously cultivated’: The Importance of Eloquence in Early American Education and the University of Virginia,” in The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University, eds. John Ragosta, Peter Onuf, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019.

“Reading Aloud: Editorial Societies and Orality in Early American Magazines,” forthcoming in Early American Literature 54, no. 1 (2018).

“Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century American Life,” afterword for the volume Thinking Together: Cultures of Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Angela Ray and Paul Stob. State College: Penn State University Press, 2018.

“Oratory and Platform Culture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Britain,” a 9,200-word commissioned article for the Oxford Handbooks Online, a division of Oxford University Press, via editor Prof. Colin Burrow. Published July 2016. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-33

“The Transatlantic Celebrity of Mr. O.: Oratory and the Structures of Reputation in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain and America,” in the special issue, “Transatlantic Celebrity” edited by Páraic Finnerty and Rod Rosenquist for Comparative American Studies 14, 1 (March 2016): 7-20.

“Forgetting History: Antebellum American Peace Reformers and the Specter of the Revolution,” in the collection Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, eds. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Frances Clarke, Clare Corbould, and Michael A. McDonnell, pp. 217-33. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

“‘A Vapour which Appears but for a Moment’: Elocution for Girls during the Early American Republic,” in Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak, eds. David Gold and Catherine Hobbs, pp. 38-59. New York: Routledge, 2013.

“Beware the Abandoned Woman: European Travelers, ‘Exceptional’ Native Women, and Interracial Families in Early Modern Atlantic Travelogues,” in Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment, eds. Toni Bowers and Tita Chico, pp. 135-47. New York: Palgrave, 2012.

“Blood and Lust: Masculinity and Sexuality in Illustrated Print Portrayals of Early Pirates of the Caribbean” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, pp. 95-115. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Reprinted in The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates, ed. David Head. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century

Expertise by Topic

American Revolution, American Founding Era, Family, Gender, Politics, Sexuality, Women