Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Germany
fellow
Robert Lee
2024-2025
Home institution
University of Cambridge
Country of origin (home institution)
United Kingdom
Discipline(s)
Colonial and postcolonial history
Modern history
Theme(s)
Post-colonialism
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Dr. Robert Lee is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cambridge with a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg, and a BA in History and Economics from Columbia University. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
His research focuses on the colonial expansion of the United States, and integrates digital spatial analysis with archival research to explore ties between Indigenous dispossession and US state formation. His first major project was “Land-Grab Universities,” a multimedia history-journalism collaboration that detailed how Indigenous land funded land-grant colleges, and has prompted investigations at several land-grant colleges. It received prizes for digital history, Native American history, and investigative journalism. Now he is working on book on how the expropriation of Indigenous land shaped the antebellum American West. Research from this project has appeared in the Journal of American History and the William and Mary Quarterly, and received awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Western History Association, and the Midwestern History Association, among others. Over the years, his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the US Department of Education, and a number of archives, libraries, and universities.
Research Project
Superintending Conquest: United States Expansion along the Indian Boundary Line
Superintending Conquest offers a new history of US colonial expansion, told through an institutional biography of the St. Louis Superintendency (SLS), the organization responsible for managing US-Indian affairs over much of the trans-Mississippi West in the first half of the nineteenth century. By combining archival research with historical GIS, the project traces this obscure but influential organization’s activities through the surprising string of well-known events it affected as it stewarded a territorial takeover aimed at incorporating the independently governed territories of Native nations into the national space of the United States. Historians know these events—from the Lewis and Clark Expedition to Bleeding Kansas—separately as textbook episodes of national history. Superintending Conquest shows that they cohere as chapters in the life of the SLS, which together reveal how the United States’ pursuit of Native land not only extended its boundaries but shaped what it became in the process.
Research Interests:
North American colonization, mostly in the nineteenth century