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Nathaniel Millett, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Co-editor of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: American History to 1877; World History until 1500; World History from 1500; The Atlantic World; Native American History; Borderlands; Colonial Latin America. Graduate: Readings in Native American History; Readings in Slavery in the Atlantic World; Readings in Atlantic History; Themes and Methods in World History; Graduate Professionalization Seminar.

Education

  • Ph.D., Cambridge University, 2003 
  • B.A., Edinburgh University, 1998 

Research Interests

I am an historian of the early modern and nineteenth century Atlantic World. I am particularly interested in the experience of Indigenous and African people in southeastern North America and the Caribbean. My work is comparative, trans-regional, and interdisciplinary. My first book, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World focused on the maroon community (independent escaped slave community) located at and around Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida between 1814 and 1816. My current book project is entitled Native Sea: An Indigenous History of the British West Indies during the Age of Slavery and Empire. The project details and analyzes the role that was played by Indigenous people within and between many societies across the Caribbean basin from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. I have also published on the history and memory of slavery at Saint Louis University.

Publications and Media Placements

Books

  • The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013)
    • Winner 2011-2013 Alpha Sigma Nu Humanities Book Award
    • Winner 2014 Michael Thomason Best Book Award Gulf South Historical Association
    • Winner 2014 Rembert Patrick Award Florida Historical Society
    • Winner 2014 Florida Book Awards non-fiction category
  • Co-edited (with Charles Parker), Jesuits and Race. A Global History of Continuity and Change, 1530-2020 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022)

Journal Articles

  • “Law, Lineage, Gender, and the Lives of Enslaved Indigenous People on Edge of the Nineteenth Century Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 2021): 687-720.
    • Winner 2022 Jane Burbank Global Legal History Article Prize: American Society for Legal History
  • “The Memory of Slavery at Saint Louis University,” American Nineteenth Century History (Winter 2016): 329-50.
  • “Borderlands in the Atlantic World,” Atlantic Studies 10:2(2013): 268-295.
  • “Slavery and the War of 1812,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly (Fall 2012): 184-205.
  • “An Analysis of the Role of the Study of the African Diaspora within the Field of Atlantic History,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (January 2012): 21-32.
  • “Defining Freedom in the Atlantic-Borderlands of the Revolutionary Southeast,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall 2007): 367-394.
  • “Britain’s 1814 Occupation of Pensacola and America’s Response: An Episode of the War of 1812 in the Southeastern Borderlands,” Florida Historical Quarterly 84(Fall 2005): 229-55.
Chapters in Edited Collections
  • “The Radicalism of the First Seminole War and its Consequences” in Fredrika Teute and Nicole Eustace, eds.,
  • Warring for America Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture published by the University of North Carolina Press, 2017): 164-201.
  • “An Overview of Florida’s Black Past” in Amanda Carlson and Robin Poynor, eds., Africa in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014): 31-49.

Links to Me Talking About Stuff

Honors and Awards

  • Weatherhead Fellowship, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM, 2016-17 
  • Mayers Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2016
  • Charles H. Watts Memorial Fellow, John Carter Brown Library, 2016
  • Fulbright-All Discipline Scholar Award, University College London, UK, 2014-15
  • Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellowship, 2014
  • Harvard University Atlantic World Seminar Research Grant, 2007
  • University of Florida Latin American Studies Travel Grant, 2007