Melissa Morris

Dr. Melissa N. Morris is a historian of Early America and the Atlantic World whose research is focused on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research incorporates archival documents in Spanish, English, Dutch, and French. Dr. Morris is particularly interested in the cross-cultural interactions that defined colonial encounters, the role of plants in driving European expansion, the dissemination of geographic and agricultural knowledge, and colonial failures. She completed her PhD at Columbia University. She has received a Fulbright to the Netherlands; a fellowship from the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies; faculty fellowships from UW’s School of Computing, and more.

 

Her first book, Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Origins of Empires, 1580-1740 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) is about how tobacco helped the English, Dutch, and French establish empires in the Americas.

 

Her second book project is centered upon Juan Rodriguez, a Black man from the Spanish Caribbean who worked as a middleman in trade for the Dutch and who was the first non-Indigenous person to live in what later became New York City.

 

Dr. Morris also works on the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to help researchers read difficult handwritten manuscripts.

 

Research Interests

Colonial America; Caribbean; Atlantic World; Comparative Empires; Environmental History; Digital Humanities

 

Course Offerings

U.S. History to 1865

Colonial America

The Americas in An Early Modern World

Environmental History

A Secret History of Science

Historical Methods

The Making of the Modern World, 1500-1800: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London (Study Abroad)