Samuel K. Fisher
Samuel K. Fisher
Samuel K. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History at the Catholic University of America, where he researches, teaches, and writes about early America, early modern Britain and Ireland, and the connections between them. His work draws on sources in Irish and Scottish Gaelic to create comparative histories of Indigenous American and Gaelic peoples in the early modern Atlantic world. While at the Keough Naughton Institute he will be working on his current book project, 1641, 1675: A Transindigenous History, which brings together methods and materials from the interdisciplinary fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and Irish-language studies to offer a new, comparative history of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and King Philip’s War. While these two conflicts are usually studied in separate national contexts, the project brings them together to shed new light on the nature of seventeenth-century colonialism, the strategies employed by colonized people to resist it, and the mutually constitutive character of settler colonialism and the modern state which combined to frustrate those strategies. He will also be leading a project for the Clingen Center on Ireland and Indigeneity.
Dr. Fisher’s first book, The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution: Diversity and Empire in the British Atlantic, 1688-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2022) offers a new interpretation of the American Revolution. By reading eighteenth-century political poetry in Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) alongside Indigenous American texts, the book argues that Gaelic and Indigenous peoples forced imperial officials to pursue inclusive strategies of empire-building, a decision that provoked widespread resentment among exclusionary patriots in Scotland, Ireland, and America. This resentment culminated in the American Revolution and also shaped the different paths followed by Ireland and Scotland as the century came to a close. Gaelic and Indian Origins received an honorable mention for the Donald A. Murphy Prize (best first book) of the American Conference for Irish Studies.
Dr. Fisher is also co-editor, along with KNI faculty fellow Brian Ó Conchubhair, of Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern, an award-winning anthology of Irish-language poetry in historical context from earliest times to the present. In addition to his books, his work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly and the English Historical Review. He received his BA and PhD from Notre Dame.