Emilie Connolly
Assistant Professor of History
Degrees
New York University, Ph.D.The Johns Hopkins University, M.A.
McGill University, B.A.
Expertise
Early American History; colonialism and empires; political economy; Native American history.Profile
I am a historian of the 19th-century United States, with a focus on the history of political economy, colonialism, and the Indigenous peoples of North America. At Brandeis, I teach courses on early America, Indigenous History, and the history of American capitalism.I'm currently at work on a book manuscript, provisionally titled "Fiduciary Colonialism: Indian Trust Funds and the Routes of American Capitalism," which examines how the federal government became both dispossessor of and trustee to the continent's first peoples. The project argues that federal trusteeship, often cast as a benevolent practice, in fact advanced an imperial strategy named "fiduciary colonialism": a form of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Indigenous wealth. Research for this project has drawn support from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the John E. Rovensky Fellowship for Business and Economic History. Before arriving at Brandeis, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, where I will return for the 2021-2022 academic year.
I'm also interested in the shifting relationships between taxation, citizenship, and Indigenous sovereignty in the 19th-century United States. My second book project will examine the implications of Indigenous polities’ longstanding immunity to colonial taxation, as enshrined by their exclusion from political representation in the United States Constitution as “Indians not taxed.”
Courses Taught
| HIST | 144b | Native North America |
| HIST | 200a | Colloquium in American History |