John Smolenski

Raised and educated on the east coast, I have been a committed Californian since I started at UC Davis in 2001. My first book, based on my 2001 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania, traced the creation of a creole culture among Quakers during Pennsylvania’s first five decades. My current book project explores similar questions of cultural transformation and power, albeit in a different region of Anglo-America. I have recently embarked on a multigenerational study of the Carter family slaves from roughly the 1600s to the early 1800s, looking at identity formation among slave communities on several Virginian plantations. I have also written previously on gender, politics and the public sphere, and comparative colonization in the Americas.