- Soka University of America

James O'Neil Spady, PhD

Assistant Professor of American History

Phone: 949-480-4054
Fax: 949-480-4126
Email: jspady@soka.edu

Education

Ph.D., The College of William and Mary
M.A., The College of William and Mary
B.A., The University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Positions Held

At SUA since 2006
2004 - 2006, Instructor, The University of Mary Washington

Research Interests

Colonialism and Early America
Theory and Historiography
Pedagogy and the Cultural Construction of Knowledge

Selected Papers, Publications & Lectures

“Reconsidering Theory: Power, the Learning Body, and Cultural Change in Early America,” Journal of Early American History, v.1, n.3 (December 2011), 1-24.
“Power and Confession: on the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2 (2011), 287-304.
"'To Vie with One against Another': Race and Demand for Non-elite White Education in an Eighteenth-Century Colonial Society," Early American Studies (September, 2011).
"Reconsidering Empire: Current Interpretations of Native American Agency during Colonization," The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Volume 10, Number 2, Fall 2009.
"Bubbles and Beggars and the Bodies of Laborers: The Georgia Trusteeship, White Labor, and the Cultural Politics of Colonialism," in L.H. Roper and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures and the Origins of the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Boston: Brill, 2007), 213-268.
"Colonialism and the Discursive Antecedents of Penn's Treaty with the Indians," in William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, eds., From Native America to Penn's Woods: Colonists, Indians, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 18-40.
"Organizing across Difference and across Campus: Cross-Class Coalition and Worker Mobilization in a Living Wage Campaign," Labor Studies, Vol.32, No.4 (2007), 357-381 (co-authored with Jennifer Bickham-Mendez).
"As if in a Great Darkness: Native American Refugees of the Middle Connecticut River Valley in the Aftermath of King Phillip's War: 1677-1697," Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Vol. 23, no. 2 (Summer, 1995), 183-197.

Courses Taught at SUA

America in the Era of Slavery
Cultures of Learning
American Experience
American West
Culture and Imperialism
Indigenous Americas

Selected Honors & Awards

Professor of the Year (one of three) 2008 and 2011.
Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences - The College of William and Mary, 2006.
Ph.D. qualifying exam (passed "with distinction").
Summa cum laude (in history) - University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1993.
American Studies Association Early American Matters Caucus steering committee member (2011-).
American Studies Association Committee on Regional Chapters member, 2008-2011 (chair 2010-2011).