Konstantin Dierks

• Associate Professor, Department of History
• Associate Editor, American Historical Review

Education

• Ph.D. at Brown University, 1999

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 734

(812) 855-6288

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

Background

My first book, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, published in 2009, focused on the cultural, social, economic, and political history of letter writing and communications 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 new book project traces the shift in American geographical understandings of the wider world across the transformation of colonial into post-revolutionary America.

Selected Awards

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

Research Interests

• Geography
• Globalization
• Communications

Courses Recently Taught

• Americans Discover the World
• 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, 2009)

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.