Emilie Connolly

Emilie Connolly joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of History. She is a historian of Indigenous North America, the history of capitalism, and the nineteenth-century United States.  

Connolly’s first book, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States, explains how and why the federal government came to act as a fiduciary to Native nations, investing funds on their behalf and retaining ultimate control over their financial wealth. Vested Interests received the Bancroft Prize in American History, the James A. Rawley Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the Stuart L. Bernath Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, among others, have supported her work on Vested Interests.  

Connolly is currently writing a second book that explores the entanglement of taxation, empire, and sovereignty in the territories we now know as the United States. To carry out research for this project, she was awarded a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress.  

Connolly’s writing has been featured in the American Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and International Labor and Working-Class History.  

In 2024, Connolly was appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Previously, Connolly was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University.