Central Connecticut State University

Faculty Member, History

Professor

About

Areas of Specialization: Atlantic World, South Pacific, Native American, Colonial America, Legal History

Katherine A. Hermes received her B.A. in history from the University of California at Irvine in 1985. She subsequently received her M.A. (1986) and M. Phil (1987) from Yale University. She earned her J.D. from the Duke University School of Law in 1992 and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1995. She joined the faculty at CCSU in 1997. Prior to her arrival, she was a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand). At CCSU, she has served as interim department chair (Fall 2001) and interim coordinator of Polish Studies (2001-2002). In the fall of 2005, she began a three-year term as co-coordinator of the Women’s Studies program.

Dr. Hermes’ teaching interests include the Atlantic World, the South Pacific, Native American History, and Legal History. She was a finalist for CCSU’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 1999 and a semi-finalist in 2005. She has presented papers by invitation at the Harvard International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World in 1997, 2000, and 2005, as well as at the Atlantic History Workshop sponsored by the Seminar in 2005. Her current research explores the ways in which legal spaces were shaped during colonizations of various places, and to what extent legal innovations remained part of the settled landscape or were replaced by the colonizers’ legal systems. She is completing two manuscripts, one entitled Decided by Law: Algonquians and Europeans in Colonial Legal Culture, 1600-1775, and a second, with co-author Alexandra Maravel, entitled The Trials of Scipio Brown, A Free African American in Colonial Rhode Island.

Selected Publications:

    * Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World, edited with Karen Ritzenhoff. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.
    * "Law of Native Americans, to 1815," in Cambridge History of Law in America, eds. Christopher Tomlins and Michael Grossberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
    * "Native Americans and the Law," Connecticut History 43, no. 2 (2004) [special issue editor].
    * "‘I, Pampenum’: Native American Women’s Use of Connecticut’s Colonial Courts," in Communities of Women, eds. Barbara Brooks and Dorothy Page Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002. With Alexandra Maravel.
    * "‘Justice Will Be Done Us’: Algonquian Demands for Reciprocity in the Courts of European Settlers," in The Many Legalities of Early America, eds. Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 2001.
    * "‘By Their desire recorded: Native American Wills and Estate Administrations in Colonial Connecticut," Connecticut History 38, no. 2 (1999).
    * "Jurisdiction in the Colonial Northeast: Algonquian, English and French Governance in the Seventeenth Century," American Journal of Legal History 42, no. 1 (1999).
    * "America’s World; The World’s America," Australasian Journal of American Studies (1996) [special issue co-editor].

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