Mary Draper, Associate Professor and Chair & Graduate Coordinator, is a historian of Early America and the Atlantic world. She is currently writing a book on the environmental history of the maritime British Caribbean. It considers how residents of the British sugar islands and officials in London made sense of the region's maritime environs, from sandy shorelines to ocean currents to prevailing winds. She has also published articles in Early American Studies, The History Teacher, Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, and Environment and History. In both her research and teaching, Draper reconstructs how early Americans lived in an entangled world that spanned empires, continents, ecosystems, and cultures. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from Rice University, she earned both her master's and doctorate from the University of Virginia.
