• Margaret Abruzzo
  Assistant Professor
  Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 2005
  
  
  

  Research Interests:

• American intellectual and cultural history
• Changing conceptions of sin, wrongdoing, and moral responsibility
• American slavery debate
• The history of morality and humanitarianism

Courses Currently Taught:

• American Civilization before 1865 (HY 203)
• Honors American Civilization before 1865 (HY 205)
• American Thought and Culture before 1860
• American Thought and Culture since 1860
• American Religious History before 1870
• Morality and Social Change
• Slavery, Freedom, and Authority
• Undergraduate Writing Seminar
• Literature of American History to 1865 (graduate)

Works in Progress:

• I am working on a book on changing conceptions of sin, wrongdoing, and moral responsibility in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American moral thought
• "The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom: Colonization and the Politics of Humaneness in the Early Republic,” in Bonds of Sentiment: Affect and Abolitionism in the Transatlantic Enlightenment

Recent Publications:

• Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
• “‘A Humane Master - An Oblidging Neighbor - A True Philanthropist’: Slavery, Cruelty, and Moral Philosophy,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 66 (Spring 2005* [2009]): 493-512.
• "Apologetics of Harmony: Mathew Carey and the Rhetoric of Religious Liberty,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 134 (January 2010): 5-30.
• Reviews in Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of British Studies, The History Teacher, The Historian

Grants, Awards, and Honors:

• John Highbarger Memorial Prize for an Exceptional Ph.D. Dissertation in History, University of Notre Dame (2006)
• Edward F. Sorin Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Notre Dame (2005-2006)
• Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (2004-2005)