- Associate Professor
- Graduate Studies Director
Biography
Education
- PhD University of Virginia, 2011.
Academic & Professional Interests
Lawrence Hatter is a historian of empire in British America and the early United States.
Research Interests
Hatter’s research explores the transnational history of American empire in the Revolutionary Era.
His book, Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border (Charlottesville & London, 2017), won the 2016 Walker Cowan Memorial Prize for an “outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies” and was named a 2017 Choice “outstanding academic title” by the American Library Association.
He is currently writing a book about empire in the long American Revolution, called American Emperor: How George Washington Ended a War and Started an Empire.
Selected Publications
- Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border. Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2017.
- “Taking Exception to Exceptionalism: Geopolitics and the Founding of an American Empire.” Journal of the Early Republic, 43 (Winter 2014): 653-60.
- “The Jay Charter: Rethinking the American National State in the West, 1796-1819.” Diplomatic History, 37 (September 2013): 693-726.
- “The Narcissism of Petty Differences? Thomas Jefferson, John Graves Simcoe and the Reformation of Empire in the early United States and British-Canada.” American Review of Canadian Studies, 42 (June 2012): 130-41.
Editorials & Public Engagement
Hatter regularly writes about early US history in the media. His pieces have appeared in national outlets, including The Washington Post and TIME magazine, as well as regional newspapers. He is a regular columnist with Spokane’s The Inlander.
You can read some of Hatter’s popular pieces here: Lawrence Hatter’s portfolio at Muckrack.com.
This link leads to an external website that is not hosted by the university. The views and content expressed are those of the faculty member and do not represent the official positions of the university.