Katherine Grandjean

Katherine Grandjean is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Her research explores early English colonization and the encounter with Native peoples, as well as the origins of American violence. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Charles Warren Center for American History, and has appeared in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Early American Studies. She is the author of American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (2015).

As the 2022-23 Hodson Trust - John Carter Brown Library fellow, she is working on a new book, In the Kingdom of Devils: The Harp Murders and the Legacies of the American Revolution. It follows the lives of two brothers from North Carolina, who committed dozens of murders across Appalachia in the 1790s. Their story reveals a landscape of discontent and conflict, lingering well after the war was over. In a broader sense, the book highlights the violent legacies of the American Revolution, some of which Americans are still grappling with.