Professor Sally Hadden Joins the Department

Professor Sally Hadden Joins the Department

The WMU Department of History is very pleased to welcome Professor Sally Hadden to the faculty. Professor Hadden joins us after several years on the faculty at Florida State University, where she taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses, including classes on the American Revolution, the Atlantic World, and American Legal History.

A specialist in American legal history prior to 1865 and eighteenth-century social/cultural history, Professor Hadden received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1984 before earning her M.A., J.D., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard in 1985, 1989, and 1993, respectively. Her work explores the connections between colonial history and legal history. Her first book, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, was published by Harvard University Press in 2001.

At WMU, Professor Hadden is excited about making immediate contributions to both the undergraduate and graduate curricula. This year, in addition to the first half of the United States history survey, she will be teaching an upper level class on the American Revolution and the graduate Historiography seminar. Hadden will also be developing courses for future years on the history of the Constitution and nineteenth-century legal history.

When she's not busy teaching, researching, and writing, Professor Hadden enjoys reading, listening to music, going to the theater, and traveling. Bach, Coltrane, and Muse all spend time in rotation; her playwright preferences are similarly eclectic (Shakespeare, Pinter, and Hare).

Professor Hadden is at work on several projects connecting history with the law and legal cultures. Her current book project is a study of legal professionals who lived and worked in Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston in the eighteenth century. She's also preparing a chapter on colonial grand jury presentments for Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History, a volume she is co-editing with Patricia Minter (Western Kentucky University). "Twenty legal historians are contributing essays to this book, the first of its kind in nearly 30 years. They're working on intriguing topics, from women's property in colonial Spanish Florida to the first western law school, in Transylvania Kentucky." The University of Georgia Press has the volume under contract. Professor Hadden is also writing the chapter covering 1700 to 1775 for the Blackwell Companion to American Legal History, another joint project, this time co-edited with Al Brophy, at the UNC-Chapel Hill law school. "This collaboration has 30 legal history essayists covering everything from critical race theory to immigration. We've just lined up the last two contributors, and started receiving the first chapter outlines and draft essays. The final version is beginning to take shape and that's very exciting."

Professor Hadden is most heavily involved with the American Society for Legal History. Having served a term on the Board of Directors, she's recently taken over the post of National Secretary. She's also on the editorial board of Law and History Review, the preeminent journal in the field. Professor Hadden has also served on book prize, program, and nominating committees with the OAH, the Southern Historical Association, and the AHA.