Jonathan Hancock is a historian of Early America focused on the region now known as the U.S. South. He teaches courses on North American history through the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, Native North America, and race and historical inquiry over time in the U.S. South. Hancock is the author of
Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America
(University of North Carolina Press, 2021), which examines how, amid prophecies, political reinventions, and war, people in the winter of 1811-12 interpreted the strongest shaking in the North American interior in at least the past 500 years. His other publications include an article in the
Journal of the Early Republic
(2013) and essays in the edited collections
Rethinking American Disasters: New Essays in Cultural, Political, and Environmental History
(forthcoming 2023),
Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812
(2017), and
The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History
(2015). He is currently at work on a new book project, "Native Charleston: The Hidden History of the Indigenous Lowcountry," a study of coastal Indigenous communities living between the Santee and Edisto Rivers, from 4,000 BCE to the present.