Erin Marie Holmes, Ph.D.

I am a  social, cultural, and political historian of Early America, slavery, and the built environment, in addition to being a public historian specializing in historic preservation and museum studies. I have particularly studied the architectural history, archaeology, and material culture of the American South (particularly Virginia and South Carolina) and the Atlantic World in the 17th and early-18th centuries. I graduated with my Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina in 2017 and my dissertation was titled “Within the House of Bondage: Constructing and Negotiating the Plantation Landscape in the British Atlantic World, 1670-1820.” At the University of South Carolina, I also completed a Certificate in Historical Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management (CRM) in the Department of Anthropology. My comps fields were US History to 1877 (18th Century – Dr. Danial Littlefield, 19th Century – Dr. Mark Smith), a composite field on architectural history, built environment, landscape, and material culture (Dr. Lydia Brandt), and the Atlantic World 1450-1850 (Dr. Matt Childs). Prior to my doctoral work, I graduated from the College of William and Mary with a B.A. in History (where I completed an honors thesis on the evolution of the staircase in Virginia architecture under the direction of Dr. James P. Whittenburg) and a Certificate in Early American History and Museum Studies from the National Institute of American History and Democracy (NIAHD).

I was the 2017-2019 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society where I served as co-curator for the 2018 exhibition (In Franklin's Footsteps: 275 Years at the American Philosophical Society) and the lead curator for the 2019 exhibition (Mapping a Nation: Shaping the Early American Republic), which had the highest visitation of any exhibition at the APS Museum before or since (190,702 visitors from April-December 2019). I then spent three years at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History before accepting the position of Visiting Assistant Professor of Public History in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. 

I am now the Visiting Assistant Professor of Early American History at the Virginia Military Institute. I am currently working on my manuscript project, “The House that Slavery Built: Social and Material Transformation in the 18th Century British Atlantic World,” and several articles.