Umd Historian Named Guggenheim Fellow

Professor Holly Brewer wins prestigious fellowship to research British influence on early American slavery.

For Immediate Release
April 23, 2014

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—University of Maryland historian Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American Cultural and Intellectual History and associate professor in the Department of History, is a recipient of a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Brewer’s research crosses boundaries between Early American and British history, cultural and intellectual history, and political and legal history.   

Brewer was one of 178 scholars, artists and scientists in the U.S. and Canada to win the award from an applicant pool of almost 3,000. Often characterized as "midcareer" awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

“We knew 3 years ago when we hired Professor Brewer that she was an extraordinary scholar,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. “I’m delighted she has received national recognition for her work and feel extremely proud of her contributions to the body of knowledge surrounding early America and slavery. 

Brewer will be working on her next book “Inheritable Blood,” which will explore the origins of colonial laws that enforced aristocratic and archaic privilege and their role in the development of slavery in the new world. She begins with the question: Why did colonial legislators pass these laws? The answer she says, “is deeply entwined with the power of the old world; indeed, inseparable.”

Brewer’s new book is “largely about empire, raising hard questions about the connectedness of so-called "feudal" and monarchical privileges, slavery and early capitalism. It traces the ideological and practical origins of slavery in the American colonies and the British Empire from the seventeenth century to the American Revolution.

She argues that slavery was supported by the power of the English monarchy and British empire, and further legitimized and promulgated through military, legal, financial and cultural force. Brewer has spent more than 10 years on the topic, examining seventeenth-century English high court documents, images and letters in the British National Archives, the Bodleian Library in Oxford among other sites, as well as a variety of U.S. archives and online collections of printed books and documents related to the British empire.

Her earlier book “By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005)” won the 2006 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, the 2006 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History and the 2008 Biennial Book Prize of the Order of the Coif, the honor society of the Association of American Law Schools, for a “book that evidences creative talent of the highest order.”  

For more information, visit the Guggenheim Foundation.