Danae Jacobson

RESEARCH

Trained as a religious and environmental historian of the U.S. West, my scholarship examines the interplays of the environment, gender, and religion in settler colonial efforts in the U.S. West. The key intervention of my scholarship is that religious and gender minorities such as Catholic nuns overlapped in messy, divergent, and distinctly Catholic ways with the broader U.S. settler effort to conquer lands and people. My first book--Habits of Conquest: Nuns, Labor, and the U.S. Settler Empire--is scheduled for release with the University of North Carolina Press in 2027. By critically reading the stories nuns told about themselves, I argue for seeing the Catholic Church as a settler institution, ambiguously embedded in the U.S. settler project and also working at other scales than the nation. Habits of Conquest shows that nuns’ Catholic storytelling is complicit in justifying the violence of U.S. conquest, even as it shows how U.S. efforts to conquer were more diffuse and uneven than is often remembered. Habits of Conquest shifts the historiography from a story centered on eastern, urban immigrants facing anti-catholicism to a church at both the margins and the vanguard of U.S. efforts to establish itself as a continental nation in the nineteenth-century.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Book Manuscript: Habits of Conquest: Nuns, Labor, and the U.S. Settler Empire, under contract with UNC Press, forthcoming 2027

“ ‘To obtain gold…for the needy and poor’: Nuns’ Begging as Gendered, Environmental, and Settler-Colonial Labor,” Pacific Historical Review, Summer 2023, vol. 92:3. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.3.364

Invited Essay, “Religion and Empire: Mythic Trails, Stolen Homelands, and Forced Migration in the Antebellum West (1840 – 1860),” in Religion and the American West: Belief, Violence, and Resilience from 1800 through today, ed. Jessica Nelson (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). LINK TO CHAPTER

“Reproducing Celibacy: Nuns’ Households in Nineteenth-Century New Mexico Territory,” The Western Historical Quarterly, Winter 2022, vol. 53:4. https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whac048

Invited Essay, “Mapping Catholic Geographies: Where Do We Find Catholic Geographies and How Do They Reorient Us?,” Special Forum in American Catholic Studies, Fall 2022, vol. 133:3     https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/acs.2022.0051

TEACHING

The world is a connected and fraught place, and while no single discipline is sufficient to address our current, intractable challenges, history plays a critical role. I am driven by the belief that mindfulness of the past adds nuance and empathy to our lives in the present. History matters, because it helps us understand how we got here, it reminds us that things have not always been the way they are now, and it suggests that things can be different in the future. Historical thinking matters for students, as they learn parts of history they have not encountered before and wrestle with the implications of this history in their lives and world. 

I work closely with the Colby College Art Museum in each of my courses. I do this for several reasons, all of which relate to my broader pedagogical commitments. First, simply learning in another space outside of our classroom reminds students that these histories we are learning about are relevant in other contexts. Second, learning from artistic sources and material objects decenters textual sources as the only important source of historical evidence. This is especially vital as we seek to listen to voices who have not typically been the “winners'' of history or the creators of traditional archives. Third, museum visits help students consider public history and the work of historical memory, something I constantly intersect while teaching U.S. history to a majority of students who are already familiar with particular versions of U.S. history.

COURSE TAUGHT SINCE 2019

U.S. Environmental History 
U.S. Survey to 1877
U.S. Empire
Doing History: Greater Reconstructions
History of the U.S. West
History of Religion in the U.S.
Historical Roots of Today’s Social Activism
What is Nature? The U.S. Environment and Histories of Settler Colonialism, Slavery, & Capitalism