Professor Travis Glasson

Travis Glasson is a historian of Britain, the British Empire, and the transnational Atlantic world.

He is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he has worked since 2006 after completing his PhD at Columbia University. A specialist in the long eighteenth century, his current research examines the American Revolution as an imperial civil war through the histories of the many people in North America, the Caribbean, and Britain who were neutral or otherwise “in the middle” during the conflict. His book, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, forthcoming) recounts the experiences of the extended Cruger family, a New York-based merchant clan whose members included the radical Bristol MP Henry Cruger Jr. Although active in the pre-war colonial resistance movement, most of the Crugers were neither ardent “patriots” nor committed “loyalists” once the empire’s constitutional conflict turned into a shooting war, and their interlinked stories crystallize some of the dilemmas and decisions faced by those in the middle. His book Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2012) analyzed the efforts of eighteenth-century Church of England missionaries to convert enslaved and free black people to Christianity in colonial America, the Caribbean, and west Africa. That book also considered how such missionary encounters contributed to wider debates about the nature of human difference, the morality of slavery, and the questions of abolition and emancipation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has served as an officer of the North American Conference on British Studies.