Richard Godbeer

Ph.D., Brandeis University (1989);
Professor

e-mail: rgodbeer@miami.edu
Office: Rm. 608 Ashe
Phone: (305) 284-5203

      Richard Godbeer received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1989. He specializes in colonial and revolutionary America, with an emphasis on religious culture, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Godbeer was born in Essex, England, and grew up in Shropshire and Gloucestershire. He then lived in Oxford for three years as an undergraduate before crossing the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1984. He moved to southern California in 1989, where he taught for fifteen years at the University of California, Riverside. He moved to southern Florida in the summer of 2004 to join the Department of History at the University of Miami. He offers courses on a broad range of topics, including sex and gender in early America, witchcraft in colonial New England, religious culture in early America, and the American Revolution.

Godbeer is author of The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press and winner of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Award for the Best First Book), Sexual Revolution in Early America (published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press and a featured selection of the History Book Club), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (published in 2004 by Oxford University Press), and The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (published in 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press). Godbeer is currently working on a volume entitled The Salem Witch Hunt: A Documentary History for the Bedford Series in History and Culture. He is grateful to have received research fellowships from a range of institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.