Erin M. Bartram
I graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 2004 with a B.A. in history and music. I worked in New York City as a historian for the National Park Service before arriving at UConn in 2006. As an undergraduate, I specialized in Medieval European history, but towards the end of my college career I had the opportunity to take a seminar at the American Antiquarian Society and found myself seduced by U.S. history. My primary field is 19th century U.S. history, with particular interests in gender and religion.
I am currently working on my dissertation, which examines privileged New England women converts to Roman Catholicism. I have more than a passing interest in histories of colonialism and cultural contact, and I am inspired by much of the theoretical work on contact zones and borderlands. As I work to understand how converts lived as Catholics while remaining New Englanders, I hope to examine how factors like age, gender, class and marital status colored the experiences of these living contact zones. My primary adviser is Richard D. Brown.