Visiting Assistant Professor

eotremba@macalester.edu

Eric Otremba is a visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College, teaching classes on early America, Atlantic slavery, and the use of the Founding Fathers within contemporary religious debates. Eric earned his doctorate from the history department at the University of Minnesota in 2012. His research interests include Atlantic slavery; the Enlightenment and the history of science; early America within contemporary identity; and historical pedagogy.

Eric's current project is entitled "Enlightened Institutions: Science, Sugar, and Plantation Slavery in the English Atlantic, 1626-1700." The work examines confluences between improvement discourses associated with the early English Enlightenment and the concurrent proliferation of Caribbean slave plantations. This project has sent Eric to archives in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Huntington Library, as he traces connections between Baconian experiment, infrastructural improvement schemes, nascent political economy theories, English convict reform, and the expansion of slave-based empire in the seventeenth century.

Eric has also published and presented on a variety of other topics including early modern technology transfer, plantations and visual culture, conspicuous consumption in the colonial Chesapeake, Daniel Defoe, slavery's legacy within contemporary labor regimes, and teaching the U.S. survey.

Prior to Macalester, Eric has taught at the University of Minnesota, Gustavus Adolphus College, and GTC College, a secondary school in Belize. He has led courses on early and modern U.S. history, world history, Atlantic slavery, and the history of technology.