Christian Koot joined the History Department in 2007. Dr. Koot earned his Ph.D in History at the University of Delaware in 2005 for his dissertation titled, “In Pursuit of Profit: Persistent Dutch Influences on the Inter-Imperial Trade of New York and the English Leeward Islands, 1621-1689.” He is the author of Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713 (NYU Press, 2011). His research interests focus on the United States in the Colonial and Early Modern periods, the history of the Atlantic world and the Caribbean, economic and commercial history, imperial history, and the History of Cartography. Dr. Koot is the Director of American Studies at Towson.
Dr. Koot is currently working on a new book-length project titled “The Merchant, the Map and Empire: Augustine Herrman’s America and Cross-Cultural Exchange, 1644-1673.” This book focuses on the cartographic and commercial experiences of Bohemian-born, New Netherland and Maryland mapmaker and merchant Augustine Herrman. Previously studied either for the map he produced—Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited, printed in London in 1673—or for his experiences as a trader, Dr. Koot argues that these two aspects of Hermann’s life were intertwined and have to be studied simultaneously. Whereas most scholarship on early modern cartography has focused on maps as objects of imperial control, Dr. Koot argues that Herrman’s work indicates the underlying colonial meaning of these objects. A product of both Dutch and English cartographic traditions and his decades-long work as a merchant trading between Dutch and English colonies in the mid-Atlantic and Caribbean, Herrman’s map offers the rare opportunity to see how Dutch and English ways of thinking about and constructing empires in the Americas combined in the mid-Atlantic to produce an entangled Atlantic world. Taking Herrman’s map as his starting point, Dr. Koot aims to fully examine the cross- national cultural world that Dutch and English peoples created in the seventeenth-century Mid-Atlantic.
“Spanning the Peninsula: Augustine Herrman, the South River, and Anglo-Dutch overland trade in the Northern Chesapeake,” The Dutch on the Delaware: New Netherland’s South River, Rensselaerswijck Seminar XXXIV, New Castle, Del.
“Mapping a Multinational Region: Augustine Herrman’s Cartographic Chesapeake,” John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R.I.
“Interimperial Foundations: Intra-Caribbean Networks, Illegal Trade, and Colonial Identity in the English Leeward Islands, 1689-1713,” American Historical Association Conference
Recent Book Reviews
“Balancing Center and Periphery,” response essay in William and Mary Quarterly to Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, The British Empire and the Atlantic World in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” forthcoming January 2012.
Awards and Honors
NEH Research Fellowship, Winterthur Museum and Library, Winterthur, Delaware, 2011
Jeannette D. Black Memorial Research Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, 2011
Faculty Development and Research Committee Summer Research Fellowship, Towson University, 2009
Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Theta Beta Chapter, Phi Alpha Theta, Towson University, 2009
Towson Academy of Scholars, Towson University, 2008-09
American Historical Association Kraus Research Grant, 2007
International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University, Short-Term Research Grant, 2007
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