Department of English

(Graduate Resident Summer 2025)

Oliver Cromwell never stepped foot on the North American continent, yet he cast a long shadow over colonial America and the early republic. My dissertation project seeks to explain why, in the two hundred years following Cromwell’s death, Americans invoked his memory during moments of crisis. Cromwell continually reemerged in early American political discourse as a potent symbol—both of muscular captaincy and of despotic usurpation—at pivotal junctures in American history. These junctures were moments of explosive political violence: King Philip’s War and the Salem witch trials; the French and Indian War and the American Revolution; the war of 1812 and the controversies of the Jacksonian Era; and the conflicts over immigration and slavery in the tumultuous decades leading up to the American Civil War. Americans turned to the blood-soaked rise and fall of the Cromwellian project in England and discovered an idiom for articulating anxieties regarding liberty and tyranny. My dissertation argues that Cromwell emerged out of Americans’ historical memory of the seventeenth-century English past as an avatar either of liberty’s violent defense or of its violent suppression.