Carolyn Eastman

Carolyn Eastman is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, book review editor for the William and Mary Quarterly, and will serve as elected president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) starting in 2025. She is the author of the prizewinning A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (2009), and The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity (2021), the latter of which received the SHEAR James Bradford Best Biography prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction. She is developing a book on Black and white New Yorkers’ experiences with the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, seeking to understand how the disease changed people’s lives as well as the city itself.