Associate Professor

Director of Graduate Admission for U.S. History

Colonial British America, History of Cartography, Environmental History, Slavery and Plantation Societies

Office Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday 1.30 - 3.30 pm

Office: 206 Randall Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6401

Fax: (434) 924-6401

Email: edelsonvirginia.edu

Ph.D., 1999, Johns Hopkins University

M.A., 1997, Johns Hopkins University

M.Litt., 1994, University of Oxford

B.A., 1992, Cornell University

Deep Springs College, Class of 1988

S. Max Edelson studies the history of colonial British America and the Atlantic world. His research seeks to describe the material as well as the cultural dimensions of new world colonization. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard University Press, 2006) examines the relationship between planters and environment in South Carolina as the key to understanding a society that was as repressive as it was prosperous. It shows that although they often represent stasis in myths of the Old South, plantations were in fact dynamic instruments of empire. Plantation Enterprise was awarded the George C. Rogers Prize by the South Carolina Historical Society and the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society.

His current research focuses on the geography and cartography of North America and the Caribbean. Victories in the Seven Years’ War yielded territorial acquisitions that extended British America west to the Mississippi, north into Canada, and south to the Florida Keys and the Windward Islands. To better understand, settle, and defend this new empire, teams of surveyors fanned out across the continent and into the Caribbean Sea to map places as diverse as frigid Nova Scotia and the tropical island of Grenada. Their quest to integrate British America on the eve of the American Revolution is the subject of his new book project, “Mapping the New Empire: Cartography and Colonization in British America, 1763-1782.” Online Presentation: Mapping the New Empire: Britain's General Survey of North America, 1763-1782 Library of Congress Webcast (4/16/08)

In 2007-2008, Edelson was the Kislak Fellow in American Studies at the Library of Congress and a Helen Corley Petit Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UIUC.

Max Edelson and Vernon Burton were awarded a $25,000 NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant to develop the Cartography of American Colonization Database.

The Cartography of American Colonization Database (CACD) is a joint effort of S. Max Edelson and the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The database will provide a highly searchable introduction to the mapping of the western hemisphere in the era of European expansion, ca. 1500-1800.

Employment

2009-present, Associate Professor of History, University of

Virginia

2007-2009, Associate Professor of History, University of

Illinois

2001-2007, Assistant Professor of History, University of

Illinois

1998-2001, Assistant Professor of History; Co-director,

Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World,

College of Charleston

Publications

Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard University Press, 2006)

“Beyond ‘Black Rice’: Reconstructing Material and Cultural Contexts for Early Plantation Agriculture,” American Historical Review (forthcoming)

“Reproducing Plantation Society: Women and Land in Colonial South Carolina,” History of the Family 12:2 (2007): 130-141.

“Clearing Swamps, Harvesting Forests: Trees and the Making of a Plantation Landscape in the Colonial South Carolina Lowcountry,” Agricultural History, 81:3 (Summer, 2007): 381-406. Reprinted in Environmental History and the American South: A Reader, edited by Paul S. Sutter and Christopher J. Manganiello.  University of Georgia Press, 2009.

“The Nature of Slavery: Environmental Disorder and Slave Agency in Colonial South Carolina” in Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds., Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

“The Characters of Commodities: The Reputations of South Carolina Rice and Indigo in the Atlantic World,” in Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel.  University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

“Carolinians Abroad: Cultivating English Identities from the Colonial Lower South,” in Joseph P. Ward, ed., Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll.  University Press of Mississippi, 2003.

“Affiliation without Affinity: Skilled Slaves in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina,” in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of South Carolina's Plantation Society. University of South Carolina Press, 2001.