HiDW Team

Peter C. Mancall is the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute; the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities; Professor of History and Anthropology; and Divisional for the Humanities at USC Dornsife.   He is the author of seven books including Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Penn, 2018); Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson–A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009); Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (Yale, 2007); Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Cornell, 1995); and, most recently, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale, 2019). He is currently writing American Origins, which will be volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. In 2012 he delivered the Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Royal Historical Society and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.  He was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in the 2019-2020 academic year.

Amy Braden is Associate Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute and Director of Programs for the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World and USC Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future grants. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Southern California in 2010. Her research focuses on early modern performance, sport, and gender studies. Her current book project examines the negotiation of categories of gender in public stories about women running. Dr. Braden has twenty years experience teaching undergraduate and graduate literature and writing courses; as a graduate student, she received the USC University Excellence in Teaching Award. In her multiple roles at USC, she works with postdoctoral fellows in the Humanities, digital humanities projects, and initiatives for communicating the value of humanities research to public audiences.

Lauren Dodds earned her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, “Collecting the Renaissance: A Cultural Legacy of Italian Renaissance Art in Midcentury America,” studies the creation and dispersal of the largest private collection of early modern Italian art ever assembled by an American collector, with over three thousand works. Her project grapples with issues surrounding collecting, conservation practices, museum history, cultural appropriation, and the place of Italian Renaissance art in twentieth-century American museums and civic life.

During her doctoral studies, Dr. Dodds received fellowships and grants from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the Visual Studies Research Institute, USC Dornsife Department of Art History, USC Provost’s Office, and the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University. Since completing her degree, Dr. Dodds taught at Pepperdine University, acted as a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute, and provided administrative support for Collaborations in History, Art, Religion, and Music (CHARM).

Will Young is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. His research focuses on New Media’s representations of blackness in the Americas. Specifically his project concentrates on the portrayals of enslaved peoples in the contemporary media. Prior to returning to academia, Will was a television producer and director for over fifteen years. He holds an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Miami, and a B.A. in Journalism from Miami University in Ohio.