Chad Holmes

We are delighted to welcome Chad Holmes as a Lecturer in Humanities for 2024-2025.

Dr. Holmes is a historian of the Early American Republic with research interests in local governance, capitalism, and the law. His current project examines how eighteenth and nineteenth-century county sheriffs served as indispensable legal actors whose routine work facilitated political and economic transformations in America. He is currently writing on political authority and legitimacy, the legal material culture, and state-building efforts in New England and Mid-Atlantic regions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society’s New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society, and West Virginia University.