The Richards Center is thrilled to announce that Ryan Quintana will be the 2025-26 Persun Visiting Scholar! This is the second year of the Mark and Ann Persun Visiting Scholars program for tenured faculty in history at the rank of associate professor. More information about the program, which supports scholars of Civil War era military or political history to develop a book-length work-in-progress, can be found on our program details page.
Ryan Quintana is an associate professor of 19th Century American History at Wellesley College with specialties in the history of political development and the state, slavery and emancipation, and the production of space. He is the author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). He is currently working on his second book project, “We Do Not Want to Be Slaves”: Empire and Expansion in the Age of Emancipation, which examines the everyday labors and governing practices of empire and infrastructural development in the North American West during the Civil War Era. When he’s not in the archives or the classroom, he enjoys working in his garden, riding his bike, and hoping that Manchester United will somehow turn it all around.
