Education

• A. California State University, East Bay (2012)
• A. San Francisco State University (2014)
• D. University of California, Davis (2021)

Bio

Dr. Sean Gallagher is an Assistant Professor of Early American History at the University of South Carolina. He teaches courses on Colonial and Revolutionary America which reflect his research interests in slavery, carceral history, and the Black Atlantic.

Dr. Gallagher is currently finishing a book on enslaved people's resistance to confiscation and public labor in the American Revolution. Black women and men survived patriot state ownership and military impressment by crafting multiple identities as prisoners, charges, and refugees. Laboring in Continental Army forts, plantations expropriated from loyalists, and public jails, they forged strategies of refusal that made these public works sites of struggle over the future of slavery. Dr. Gallagher has published articles on his findings in the Journal of Southern History and Slavery & Abolition. 

After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis in 2021, Dr. Gallagher was a David Center for the American Revolution postdoctoral fellow at the American Philosophical Society. His research has also been supported by the South Caroliniana Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the William L. Clements Library, and the Mellon Research Initiative in Racial Capitalism.

Grad Fields

Dr. Gallagher is currently accepting graduate students working on topics in U.S. History to 1877.