Konstantin Dierks

• Assistant Professor, Department of History

Education

• Ph.D. at Brown University, 1999

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 734

(812) 855-6288

www.indiana.edu/~kdhist/home.html

Background

My current book project, In My Power: Letter Writing in Early America, focuses on the cultural, social, economic, and political history of letter writing in the early anglophone Atlantic World. Letter writing steeped the white middle class in imperatives of self-improvement and vulnerabilities of personal agency, while assuring them of their social innocence, their technical credentials, and their moral deserving. The force of this social myopia is as critical as racism, I argue, in explaining the glaring dearth of moral conscience underwriting the legalization of massive violence toward Native Americans and African-Americans so endemic to the eighteenth century.

Tentatively entitled Placing America in a New World: Global Imaginaries in a Revolutionary Age, my next project will trace the shift in geographical understandings of the world from colonial to post-colonial America.

Selected Awards

• Library Company of Philadelphia PEAES and ASECS Fellowships (2005)
• W.M. Keck Foundation and Mayers Fellowships, Huntington Library (2001)
• NEH Summer Institute, "Rethinking America in a Global Perspective" (2008)

Research Interests

• Early America
• Early Modern Atlantic world
• Communications
• Middle class
• Globalization

Courses Recently Taught

• Cultural Encounters in Early America
• Observing Early Modern America
• The Geographic as a Category of Historical Analysis (graduate seminar)

Publication Highlights

Books

In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)

Articles

"Middle-Class Formation in Eighteenth-Century North America," in Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith, eds., Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 99-108.

"Letter Writing, Stationary Supplies, and Consumer Modernity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World." Early American Literature 41, no. 3 (Nov. 2006): 474-494.