Elliott Cramer

I am a historian of colonial America and the early United States. I began my PhD coursework at UC Berkeley in 2016 and followed my advisor, Prof. Mark Peterson, to Yale in Fall 2018. 2022-23 therefore marks my fifth year as a graduate student at Yale, and my seventh as a PhD student.

 

My dissertation focuses on the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in Maryland, c.1760s-1816. I hope to write a long history of the schism that erupted in 1814-1816, when Rev. George Dashiell and his evangelical followers formed their own church in protest against the consecration of Bp. James Kemp. My interest lies less in the changing relationship, post-Revolution, between church and state, than in the internal politics of the church. Although historians have recently begun to place greater stress on the Anglican roots of Methodism, none (to my knowledge), have told the story of the colonial Church of England in terms of “orthodox” and “evangelical” factions or parties, or acknowledged the continuing strength of evangelicalism in the Episcopal Church after the Methodist schism.

 

I spent the academic year 2021-2022 living in Baltimore and working at the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland archives. In the fall of 2022, I will be teaching for Prof. Paul Kennedy’s “Military History of the West since 1500” (HIST 221).