USU History Professor Heads to Yale for Fellowship

Steven Heath Mitton, an assistant professor of history at Utah State University, is the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2010-2011 academic year from Yale University’s MacMillan Center. Mitton is a faculty member at USU’s Brigham City Campus.

Mitton will spend February 2011 in residence at the affiliated Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, where he is scheduled to present a selection of his scholarship. That presentation, “Manifest Dilemmas: American Slavery versus Atlantic Freedom in the Age of Industrial Revolution,” is Wednesday, Feb. 16.

Mitton has teaching responsibilities at USU’s Brigham City regional campus and learned in May 2010 he had been selected for the highly competitive fellowship that is intended to recognize and promote promising new research in the field of historical study of slavery and abolition.

Previously, he presented an invited paper to Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute and has addressed audiences at scholarly meetings, including the 2010 conference of the American Historical Association. He is also published in the respected journals Slavery & Abolition and the Journal of the Early Republic.

Mitton said the presentation at the Gilder Lehrman Center will draw from a chapter in his monograph-in-writing “The Underground War: Slaveholding America, Postemancipation Britain, and the Struggle for Mastery of the Atlantic.” He said his talk will highlight how the material interests of postemancipation societies like Great Britain and the American North in the 1840s clashed with those of the slaveholding American South.

“That clash set the pivotal context for the final decade of sectional crisis the ended ultimately in the American Civil War,” Mitton said. “The interpretation is part of an increasingly significant historical emphasis to understand the past experience of the United States in a global context.”

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition is a part of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. According to its website, it is dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of knowledge concerning all aspects of chattel slavery and its destruction.

Mitton joined USU as an assistant professor in 2008 following a one-year assignment as a visiting assistant professor. He held visiting positions at St. Lawrence University, Centenary College of Louisiana and Northwestern State University. He earned his doctorate in history in 2005 from Louisiana State University. Earlier degrees include a master’s in history from the University of Texas at Arlington and a bachelor’s degree in history from Western State College of Colorado.

For interested East Coast Aggies, Mitton’s presentation is Feb. 16 at the Yale Macmillan Center, 230 Prospect Street, New Haven, Conn. It begins at noon.

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Contact: Steven Heath Mitton, (435) 734-9958, ext. 281, heath.mitton@usu.edu

Writer: Patrick Williams, (435) 797-1354, patrick.williams@usu.edu