Camilla Townsend

Born and raised in New York, Camilla Townsend graduated from Bryn Mawr College and spent time living and working in Latin America before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. in Comparative History at Rutgers University. She taught at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s; while there, she published some of her most well-known academic work, including Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America (2000) and Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2005). In 2010, Townsend was awarded a prestigious grant from the Guggenheim foundation. She currently teaches at her alma mater, Rutgers, and has continued to publish widely in the fields of early Native American and Latin American history, often focusing on the minutiae of the relations between the indigenous and Europeans throughout the Americas in the early days of American history. Her work draws upon information left behind by both settlers and indigenous peoples in primary source documents such as letters, diaries, articles, and books, recontextualizing and reimagining the lives of the people behind those missives. In her own words, Townsend writes that she hopes her work allows readers to “gain insight into the ways in which indigenous people conceptualized history and imagined the future.”