Adrian Weimer

  • Ruane Center for the Humanities 121

Personal profile

Biography

Adrian Chastain Weimer is a professor of history at Providence College. A historian of colonial America, she researches constitutionalism, legal access, Indigenous diplomacy, and religious toleration. Her most recent book, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (2023), was awarded the John Winthrop Prize. It centers on grass roots political mobilizing in the 1660s, when puritan colonists creatively organized to protect local institutions from the demands of the newly restored Stuart monarchy. She also recently co-edited The Writings of Daniel Gookin and Allied Documents (forthcoming in 2026). The Bay Colony's Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Gookin (1612-1687) recorded his frequent interactions with Nipmuc, Massachusett, Pennacook and other Native communities in social, legal, religious, and wartime contexts. She is currently writing a book on Anglo-American and Indigenous multilateral diplomacy in the later seventeenth-century, centering on the alliances of Pawtucket leader James Quannapohit. Weimer's work has been honored with the Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize, the Michael Kennedy Prize, and with longterm fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University

… → 2008