Professor Wendy Warren specializes in the history of colonial North America, and the early modern Atlantic World. She is particularly interested in the day-to-day practice of colonization, and in the negotiations and conflicts that exist between would-be rulers and the unruly.

Professor Warren joined the department after receiving her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She completed her Ph.D. while a junior research fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford University. Her book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016), explores the lived experience of chattel bondage in seventeenth-century New England, illuminating the deadly symbiosis between slavery and colonization in the Atlantic World. New England Bound won the Organization of American Historians' 2017 Merle Curti Social History Prize, was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Finalist for the 2017 Berkshire Conference Book Prize, and a Finalist for the 2017 Harriet Tubman Prize, awarded by the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library in the field of Atlantic slavery.

She is currently working on several projects, among which is The Carceral Colony, an exploration of the role of prisons and imprisonment in colonial North America, and Sex Enslaved, a study of coerced sexual relationships in slave systems.

Professor Warren also serves as the Princeton liaison to the Newberry Library Consortium in American Indian Studies, and as the Princeton representative to the MCEAS Consortium.

Teaching Interests

Professor Warren's teaching interests include colonial North America, Native American history, comparative slavery, critical prison studies, women's history and gender studies, and more.

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