Chad Anderson

Assistant Professor of History & Coordinator of Individual Student Program (ISP)

Dr. Anderson’s first book, The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2020. His book explores the history and enduring significance of the built and natural landscape of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Six Nations). During the eighteenth century, a traveler through Haudenosaunee lands would have encountered places associated with mythical other-than human beings, mysterious ancient ruins, monuments to battles, dozens of current and former village sites, and great fields of corn, beans, and squash. On British maps, the Haudenosaunee dominated colonial geography—the center of an Indian power that spread across eastern North America. By the early nineteenth century, however, the Haudenosaunee had largely disappeared from maps, replaced by Euroamerican towns. Yet the Haudenosaunee did not vanish and their landscape’s storied history continued to shape Euroamerican and Native American understandings of what became Upstate New York. The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia examines this process of erasure and the stories that people wove about the land to define its past and future.

Recent courses taught:

• American Political History
• American Environmental Relations
• Colonial America
• Revolutionary America
• Jacksonian America
• Native American Artifacts & Stories
• American Indian History to 1763
• The American West in Film and Reality
• Historical Methods

Distinctions (awards, fellowships, and grants):

• John Murrin Prize, award by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies for the best article
  published in Early American Studies, 2017.
• University of California, Davis Humanities Institute Dissertation Year Fellow, 2011-2012.

Publications:

• The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
• “Native American Networks” in Trevor Burnard, ed., Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• “Rediscovering Native North America: Settlements, Maps, and Empires in the Eastern Woodlands,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, No. 3 (Summer 2016): 478-505.
• “The Built Landscape and the Conquest of Iroquoia.” In Carole Shammas, ed., Investing in The Early Modern Built Environment: Europeans, Asians, Settlers and Indigenous Societies (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2012), 265-294.

College service and professional affiliations:

• Environment, Sustainability, and Society Steering Committee
• Museum Studies Minor Advisory Committee
• Graduate Advisory Committee
• American Historical Association