Matthew Bahar

  • Associate Professor of History

Areas of Study

Education

  • BA, Loyola University-Chicago, 2001
  • MA, St. Cloud State University, 2006
  • PhD, University of Oklahoma, 2012

Biography

Matt Bahar is a historian of colonial North America. His research interests lie along the Atlantic littoral at the intersection of American Indian, imperial, and maritime history. His first book, Storm of the Sea, is a maritime history of Wabanaki, French, and English relations in northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes during the 17th and 18th centuries.

 A second book project explores cultural encounters around the catastrophe of shipwreck in early America.

His research has been supported by a yearlong fellowship at the Huntington Library and short-term fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the American Philosophical Society.

Bahar teaches classes on early America, Native America, the early modern Atlantic World, and piracy.

Spring 2025

The Puritans and Their World — HIST 414

History Senior Honors II — HIST 502

  • "From Pirates to Patriots: Constructing the Oppositional Indian on the Road to the American Revolution," Eighteenth-Century Studies 56:2 (Winter 2023)
  • Storm of the Sea: Indians & Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail (Oxford University Press, 2019)
  •  “People of the Dawn, People of the Door: Indian Pirates and the Violent Theft of an Atlantic World,” Journal of American History 101:2 (September 2014)

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