Professor Charles Prior

• PhD in History, Queen’s University (Canada), 2003
• MA in Political Science, University of Toronto, 1999

Treaties are one of the globe’s most significant, but least appreciated, forms of legal and cross-national negotiation and agreement. My work focusses on how treaties concluded between Native Nations and a succession of colonial, state and national governments provide new ways of understanding North American history as shaped by a pervasive diplomatic culture, leading to hundreds of agreements that remain laws of the land within the United States, and which are driving the resurgence of Native sovereignty across North America. This work forms the core of my contribution to the Treatied Spaces Research Group, which I founded with my colleague Professor Joy Porter. The Group is now established as a globally significant node for collaborative, impactful and cross-disciplinary research and knowledge exchange that actively engages multiple communities of interest.

My approach to treaties is interdisciplinary, employing materials and methods that cut across History, Political Science, Law, and Native American Studies. It is rooted in traditional archival research, the production of digitally-immersive mapping and sound-based platforms, and in collaboration with Indigenous academics, knowledge keepers, curators, and artists. My published work employs treaties as a lens to rethink received interpretations of power dynamics within imperial and state frameworks. Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America (Cambridge University Press, 2020) foregrounds Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and power to refine the place of settler colonialism in American colonial and early republican history. This theme is expanded in the recently completed Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty in the American Northeast. Placing a succession of ‘Covenant Chain’ treaties between the Haudenosaunee (sometimes called the ‘Iroquois’) and the British Crown at its centre, the book argues that treaties defined a rules-based system of interaction in the international locales of Northeastern North America. A new project, supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2024-27), is ‘Treatied States of America: Interior Diplomacy and the Contest for (Native) American Resources’. This cross-disciplinary study will place archives into dialogue with contemporary Indigenous legal and political thought to frame a new account of the interior diplomacy that formed the US and will influence debates on energy, resources, and the sovereignty of Native Nations. The project seeks to illustrate the powerful connections between colonial pasts and the legal and political contexts that frame the pursuit of a post carbon future.

I am a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College, and review applications within the Future Leaders Fellowship stream. During my career, I have held several visiting appointments and fellowships and have been privileged to serve in senior leadership roles, including REF Lead, Head of Department, and Head of School. 

I have been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2024-27), and therefore have no current UG teaching assignment. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, over the past 20 years I have designed and delivered a range of UG and PGT modules and have also contributed to the development of cutting- edge History programmes that emphasise co-production, continuous assessment, and core competencies.

Early American and Native American History, 1600-1800; Early Modern British History; History of Political Thought; History of International Thought; Diplomacy and Treaties; Historical Argument and Practice;

Agenda for 2024-2025

Research: as part of my Leverhulme MRF project, I will complete research in the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, Maryland), and publish podcasts with leading figures in the Native rights community in Alaska.

Launch: I am preparing to launch ‘Movement and Common Worlds’, an interactive map-visualisation, which forms part of the suite of digital outputs produced under our AHRC SRG, ‘Brightening the Covenant Chain’.

Editorial: Connected Nations: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and Indigenous Rights, ed. Charles Prior, Mark Walters and John Borrows. An international collection of essays by leading scholars that places the Royal Proclamation in new historic and contemporary contexts. My co-editors and I are finalising a proposal to McGill-Queen’s University Press. We will also complete podcasts on the intersection of Indigenous and Federal law in Canada.

Workstreams: as part of ‘Historic Houses, Global Crossroads’, and in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Newcastle, the National Trust, and Queen’s University Belfast, I will begin work on a new interactive map that illustrates global connections between two Northern Ireland historic houses, begin pre-production of three soundscapes, and begin primary research for articles on historic houses as international diplomatic locales.

Funding in Current REF Cycle

• ‘Treatied States of America: Interior Diplomacy and the Contest for (Native) American Resources’, Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, 2024-27
• (Co-Lead) ‘Historic Houses, Global Crossroads: Revisioning Two Northern Ireland Historic Houses and Estates’, AHRC Standard Research Grant, 2024-27 (£1.49M).
• (Co-Investigator), ‘Brightening the Covenant Chain: Revealing Cultures of Diplomacy Between the Crown and the Iroquois Confederacy’, AHRC Standard Research Grant, 2021-24 (£931k)
• ‘Conquest and the “Right to Hold”: Territorial Sovereignty and the American Revolution’. Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2017-18.