Max Flomen

Teaching Fields

• North America to 1800
• Native America
• Atlantic World
• Comparative Slavery
• Borderlands

Degrees

• Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2018
• M.A., McGill University, 2011
• B.A., McGill University, 2009

Research Interests

Dr. Flomen is a historian of Early North America. His in-progress monograph, Beyond Mountains: Marronage & Revolution in the Borderlands, 1500-1850 is a history of self-liberation struggles in the Southwest & northern Mexico. It argues that Native peoples opposed colonial regimes along ideological and spatial axes in ways that convinced non-Indigenous peoples to support this emancipatory counterculture. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory, this work tracks the circulation of anti-colonial epistemologies and practices among the Indigenous nations of the interior. Emphasizing the intersection of Native and African American aspirations while bridging the fields of Borderlands and Atlantic History, Beyond Mountains re-writes the history of slavery and emancipation from a continental & long durée perspective. It challenges the racialization of resistance to colonialism in the early modern world, which has cloistered the joint efforts of Indigenous and African peoples to build independent communities and failed to recognize the development of a coherent movement opposing Euro-Christian imperialism. By centering narratives of enslavement and autonomy around smaller communities rather than the world-systems, nation-state, and institutional frameworks favored by many historians, his work suggests that the Haitian Revolution was not the only successful slave uprising in hemispheric history.

At WVU, Dr. Flomen teaches a variety of courses on Early America, and works with graduate students studying Indigenous history, the Atlantic World, borderlands, and the Civil War in the West.