I am a historian of the early modern British Atlantic World, and in particular Scotland and colonial British North America. My research focuses on politics and religion in Britain and its North American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am interested in the ways that religious identity shaped political loyalties to empires and nation-states, including the British Empire and the United States, between 1650 and 1800.

I teach courses on American, British, European, and World History in both the early modern and modern eras. All of my courses take seriously the role that religion played in the development of early modern empires and nations, and how interactions between Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Native Americans transformed the world, for better or worse.

As of the Fall of 2024, I am an Assistant Professor of History at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH, where I teach courses on American and British history, as well as Historical Methods seminars and courses in the Liberal Education program. I was previously an Assistant Professor of History at New England College for three years. Prior to that, I was a Lecturer of History at Saint Anselm College for a year and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Boston College for two years.

In 2023-24, I was awarded the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership Award from Project Pericles. In 2022-23, I was a Carlyle Sitterson Visiting Research Fellow at the Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina. Prior to that, in 2018-19, I was also the W.M. Keck Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA, where I spent three months in residence conducting research towards publishing my first book, Imperial Zealots: Scots and the Rise and Fall of British North America.

You can find me on Twitter @CraigGallagher where I tweet about the academic job market, politics, sports, and, of course, history and how we research and teach it.

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