Today at Brown

Drawn by questions of long-term social and cultural changes, Linford Fisher focuses his research on the religious history of early America. “One of the ways to measure and understand processes of cultural change is through religious ideas, because they are typically the center of any society and culture,” he said.

Fisher is specifically interested in the religious and cultural history of Native Americans in 18th-century New England. His current book project, titled The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, examines seven Native American communities in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island, New York. He traces the groups’ “selective adoption” of Christian ideas and practices over the course of the 18th century.

“The focus is the first Great Awakening in the 1740s, which was sort of a turning point for those groups in terms of their orientation to churches, religion, and English culture. The narrative is one of interest, embrace, and then rejection,” Fisher said.

Fisher received his doctorate in the history of religion in America from Harvard University in 2008. He taught as an assistant professor of history at Indiana University–South Bend for one year and served as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. He has been honored with recent fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and Harvard Divinity School.

Professor Karl Jacoby, who chaired the search committee, says Fisher will deepen the department’s already considerable strengths in colonial history and the early modern world and build upon connections to the John Carter Brown Library. “Linford Fisher is a gifted young historian who, by combining a close study of religious practice with colonial struggles over land, promises to recast how we think about Native American spirituality,” he said.

Fisher’s courses at Brown center on the colonial period and include topics such as Native and European encounters; the history of religion in America; and the material culture of early America. He plans to focus his next research project on the “shades of servitude” in colonial New England among Africans and Native Americans.