Christine DeLucia is an Associate Professor of History at Mount Holyoke. She specializes in indigenous and colonial histories of North America, particularly in the Northeast/New England. Her current research is on the conflict known as King Philip’s War (1675-1678), which violently transformed Algonquian and Euro-American settler communities in the late seventeenth century. This war—one of the formative events of early America—did more than momentarily disrupt these societies. It dramatically altered the balance of power in the Northeast, and shaped how subsequent generations have understood themselves, their entangled histories, and their presence on lands that remain disputed. As DeLucia’s work shows, memories of this war and related violences continue to inflect discourses about sovereignty, dispossession, decolonization, and regeneration.
DeLucia approaches early American and indigenous histories in an interdisciplinary manner. Besides working extensively in regional and local archives, she also draws upon material and visual culture—such as paintings, household objects, and family heirlooms—archaeological sources, ethnography and oral history, and the land itself. Her goal is to bring into the historical conversation voices, perspectives, and narratives that have tended to be overlooked or marginalized by dominant conceptions of the past, and to stress the dynamic, contested character of history-making.