"Utopian Dreams at the End of Early America, 1663-1860"
Francis Russo is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation is a history of utopian socialism in early North America that traces its aspirations, failures, and transfigurations from the era of colonization to the nineteenth century. He argues that utopian socialism in the United States was not just a European import but rather a co-creation of many peoples—Indigenous, African, and European—on a vast continent, and that their distinctive reform agenda set by environmentalist conceptions of human nature and social evolution provided the most radical challenges within antislavery and economic reform. His work joins recent subnational histories of antislavery and legal culture by plumbing local and state archives across the East Coast and the Midwest to reveal a rich array of reform activity often missed by outsized attention to national politics. Grounding these stories in granular matters of local politics, quotidian reform activity, and diverse theories of human nature, the project contributes to and challenges the fields of North American slavery and antislavery, the new history of capitalism, settler colonialism, and U.S. reform movements. Francis earned a B.A. from Trinity College, and an M.A./M.Sc. from the International and World History dual-degree program at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.