Jason Sellers

Associate Professor of History
Office: Monroe 218
Phone: 540.654.1471
Email: jseller4@umw.edu

Jason R. Sellers holds graduate degrees from the University of California, Irvine, and an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a cultural and environmental historian of 17th-and 18th-century North America. In addition to ongoing collaborations with Virginia’s Indigenous nations, he is currently researching the history of South Asians and others identified as “East Indians” in colonial Virginia. He offers courses on colonial North America, Native American history, and environmental history. And baseball.

Education

  • Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2010. History.
  • M.A., University of California, Irvine, 2007. History.
  • B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2003. History and English.

Courses

American Studies 202b: Baseball in America

History 131: American History to 1865
History 132: American History since 1865
History 297: History Colloquium
History 298: History Practicum

History 300b3: Native American History since 1890
History 307: Native American History (to 1890)
History 322: U.S. Environmental
History 323: Colonial America

History 444: American Slavery
History 471E7: American Wilderness
History 471F6: Atlantic Piracy

Publications

“Moota and Sembo, Enslaved ‘East Indians’ in Colonial Virginia” (In progress)

Co-authored with Dr. Brad Hatch (Patawomeck), “Interpreting Indigenous Geography, Interaction, and Movement in the Upper Northern Neck: The Patawomecks in the Seventeenth Century,” Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine LXXIII, No. 1 (December 2023): 9657-9685.

“The Trial of ‘an Indyan called Nangenutch or Will’: Indian identity and identification in a 1668 Long Island rape trial,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 6, no.1 (June 2019): 1-31

“Mindful of their bellies and gullets: Anatomical imagery and discourse in England’s colonization of North America,” Journal of Early American History 9, no.1 (April 2019): 3-33.

“‘Lands fit for use’: Native subsistence patterns and Euroamerican agricultural landscaping in colonial New York,” New York History 97, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2016), 293-318.

“History, Memory, and the Indian Struggle for Autonomy in the 17th-century Hudson Valley,” Early American Studies 13, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 714-42.