People
Caitlin Fitz
Early America; the United States through 1865; U.S. relations with Latin America
Office: Harris Hall #205
Phone: 847-467-2906
E-mail: c-fitz
northwestern.edu
Caitlin Fitz (Ph.D., 2010, Yale University) is a historian of early America, in a broad and hemispheric sense. Her work explores early U.S. engagement with foreign communities and cultures, as well as the relationship between ordinary people and formal politics. Her current manuscript, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, illuminates the wave of enthusiasm for Latin American independence that engulfed the United States during the early nineteenth century; the project reveals how events in Spanish America and Brazil shaped popular understandings of race, revolution, and republicanism within the United States. Fitz has also written about U.S. citizens in insurgent Brazil (The Americas, 2008), Iroquois communities during the U.S. revolution (Journal of the Early Republic, 2008), and antislavery activists in Tennessee (Civil War History, 2006). She has conducted archival research in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English, and she has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her courses at Northwestern will focus on colonial North America, the age of American revolutions, and the United States through 1865.
