Michael Hattem
I am a first-year PhD student from New York City. I graduated summa cum laude and received my B.A. with Honors in History from the City University of New York. My main period is the long eighteenth century, within which my interests lie mostly in political culture and intellectual history. I am especially interested in the later colonial period and the coming of the American Revolution in the middle colonies, primarily New York. I am also interested in the Enlightenment, print culture, and book history of British North America, and the history of New York City.
The majority of my primary research has been on New York City in the decades preceding independence. My junior honors thesis at the City College of New York, “’As Serves our Interest best’: The Political Culture of New York City and the Imperial Crises, 1765-1776,” sought the origins of the city’s popular response to the imperial crises in the colony's longstanding social and political culture of enlightened self-interest. My senior honors thesis, “’Every wealthy Dunce is loaded with Honours’: The Cultural Imperative of William Livingston and the Anglophone Enlightenment in New York City, 1746-1770,” examined the influence of the Enlightenment on the cultural activism of William Livingston and his struggle with the Anglican clergy for cultural arbitration of the city in the 1750s.
Outside of academia, I am a multi-instrumentalist that plays six musical instruments, a songwriter, and an audio engineer. Also, my wife, Veronica, and I are the proud parents of two boys, Lucien, 5, and Tristan, 4. We are all long-time supporters of Arsenal Football Club.
