10 Jun 2026
I recently returned from co-leading a Global Scholars trip to Morocco. It was a great trip!
We traveled across much of the country, and I was in awe by the variety of the landscapes, from Atlantic beaches and rocky coasts to the dunes of the Sahara and the snow-peaked Atlas mountains. The lack of humidity made it clear we were no longer in Virginia!
The food was incredible. I really enjoyed eating tagine and traditional bread (especially after watching Michael Pollan’s Cooked on the plane), and I managed to drink mint tea almost every day.
The meal that left the deepest impression on me was the traditional Friday couscous. It was SO good! Typically served communally after Friday prayers, the dish featured steamed vegetables and ridiculously tasty chicken alongside caramelized onions, almonds, raisins, and chickpeas. But what really surprised me was the couscous itself. It was nothing like the flavorless instant couscous I had learned to hate as a child. It reminded me of the first time I had fresh pasta and it blew my mind how much better it was.
As is often the case when I travel, the most meaningful experience was meeting people. I enjoyed the opportunity to get to know our twelve students on the trip. Randolph is truly full of smart and kind students!
Most of all, I was moved by the hospitality of the Moroccans we met. The first time I had couscous, for instance, was in the home of one of our guides. Rather than taking us to a restaurant as planned, he surprised everyone by bringing us to his house, where his family had spent hours lovingly preparing the meal. It was a beautiful (and tasty) surprise, and one that I expect will stick with me for a long time.
15 May 2026
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
Though I was trained primarily as a historian of the US, departmental needs mean that I have pushed myself to focus more on Atlantic and transnational history.
This past spring, I decided to teach a course on the Age of Revolutions. While such a course is far outside my temporal and geographic scope, it seemed like a fitting course for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And of course, it was another great opportunity for me to dig into the Haitian Revolution and listen to Boukman Esperyans!
In preparing to teach the course, I leaned especially on Rafe Blaufarb’s The Revolutionary Atlantic (Oxford, 2017), Ben Marsh and Mike Rapport’s Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), and Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World (Harvard, 2005).
A few highlights from the course:
- Virtual lecture about Hamilton and “founders chic” by Dr. Shira Lurie, author of The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic (UVA Press, 2023)
- Two-day interactive role-playing game using John Patrick Coby’s Raising the Eleventh Pillar: The Ratification Debate of 1788 (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021). This was my first time using a “Reacting to the Past” game in class, and students responded really well to it.
- Thayer Lecture with Dr. Jane Kamensky, CEO of Monticello and author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (Norton, 2016).
- Class trip to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, including vault tour and panel with museum employees.
- Graphic history novel by Charles F. Walker, Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru (Oxford, 2020). Another first–I’ve personally really enjoyed reading Oxford’s Graphic History series but hadn’t assigned one until this year. It worked well!
- Weekly “think aloud” assignments where students recorded themselves talking about the week’s reading and what it has to do with them. In addition to avoiding AI use, I found the assignment helpful for honing students’ verbal and synthesizing skills
- Research paper assignment. I worked to scaffold this assignment – including two guided library work session. One student paper about loyalists in the American Revolution even won Randolph College’s 2025/26 Best Writing in the Arts & Letters Division!
Image below: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert. Courtesy of Library of Wikimedia Commons.
01 May 2026
This past spring, I was selected to serve as one of two faculty on the Global Scholars trip to Morocco. While I was not especially familiar with the country’s history and culture, I saw it as an opportunity to expand my teaching in Atlantic history.
My colleague Aaron Shreve and I led six pre-trip orientation sessions on Moroccan history and culture. Preparing for these sessions was challenging, as I had never visited Morocco and had spent relatively little time studying it. To assist me, I relied heavily on longtime Harvard historian Susan Gilson Miller’s A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge, 2013). I also consulted the Encyclopedia of Africa (Oxford, 2010) and documentaries such as Africa’s Great Civilizations (PBS, 2017) and Lost Kingdoms of Africa (BBC, 2012).
One of my favorite orientation sessions centered on the screening of Casablanca Beats (2021). The Moroccan submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2021, the film hits a lot of very familiar “beats”; it felt like a Moroccan version of Footloose and Dead Poets Society. Yet, the change of setting made it feel fresh. It gave students an opportunity to think about transnationalism and how the experiences of Moroccan college students were both similar to and different from their own experiences at Randolph. It also helped students begin to think more about religion, region, and gender in Morocco. Made by Moroccan filmmakers, the film provided an excellent counterpoint to Hollywood’s standard depictions of Morocco. Throughout our travels (see below!), the group kept coming back to Casablanca Beats.
In addition to talking Moroccan films, history, and politics (and trip/packing logistics), we also spent a lot of time preparing students to think about how they could make the most of the trip. Role playing scenarios was a fun way to get them to do that. In our discussions afterward, I found myself frequently returning to what’s become my personal travel mantra: be present, patient, and flexible – and always look for the good.
10 Feb 2026
As part of my African American history class, I invited Dr. Adam McNeil to give a public lecture on his work about enslaved Afro-Virginian women during the Revolutionary War. It was a wonderful lecture and an honor to host him at Randolph. Special thanks to support from Randolph’s Campus Events Committee and the Intercultural Center for supporting the event.Here’s my introduction to Dr. McNeil’s talk:
_One hundred years ago – to the day – Americans were in the midst of celebrating the very first Black History Month, or as it was known then, “Negro History Week.” Designed by historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Negro History Week was created to help remedy the systematic erasure of Black Americans from American history. Dr. Woodson did not envision Negro History Week as the only time people should learn about Black history. Instead, he imagined it as an opportunity for schools to demonstrate what students had learned all year–it was a call for intentional remembering.
As Woodson envisioned it, Negro History Week was not an exercise in memorization or a box to be checked. He understood that how we remember the past has profound implications for the present. After all, 1926 was the height of Jim Crow segregation. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan was at an all-time high. Lynchings remained prevalent. Nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric saturated public discourse. In Virginia, the General Assembly was passing racial integrity laws that banned interracial marriage, enforced the so-called “one-drop rule,” and mandated segregation in public spaces.
Dr. Woodson knew what he was doing when he created Negro History Week. He believed that knowing the truth could tear down the walls of segregation, hatred, racism, and white supremacy. “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom,” Woodson declared.
Fifty years later, in 1976, Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month. And of course, 1976 was also the bicentennial, the year that Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So at precisely the moment Americans were asking themselves, “What is America? Who is American? And what does “liberty and justice for all” really mean?” At that moment, Woodson’s intellectual descendants were pushing to recommit the nation to remembering Black history.
This collision – of both the intentional remembering of Black history and the nation – is here with us today, too. 2026 is, after all, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. And we are once again living in a time when the history of the Revolution and the founding era is being debated. Just weeks ago in Philadelphia, the National Park Service removed signage addressing the history of enslaved people held at the President’s House where George Washington lived while serving as the first President of the United States. History is never just about the past.
And so, in this 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence and the 100th anniversary year of Black History Month, we have not just the opportunity but a duty to examine the experiences of Black Americans during the American Revolution. That is what makes today’s conversation so timely—and why I’m so excited to welcome our speaker today, a leading young scholar of African American history and the Revolution.
Adam Xavier McNeil is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Dr. McNeil is currently revising his award-winning dissertation into a book, Contested Liberty: Fugitive Women and the Shadow of Re-Enslavement and Displacement in a Revolutionary World. Contested Liberty is under contract with the University of Virginia Press.
Please join me in giving a Wildcat Welcome to Dr. Adam McNeil._
10 Dec 2025
This fall I was nominated in the Rising Star category for the 2026 State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Awards! As part of the nomination process, I had to solicit letters from supervisors, colleagues, students, and community leaders. Several letter-writers graciously shared their letters with me. What a treat! Regardless of whether I’m selected or not, I appreciate having a stash of letters I can turn to next time I’m feeling blue.
A few months earlier, the image below appeared on the college’s homepage. I was hoping my 15 minutes of fame would be a little cooler, but you take what you can get, I guess!
01 Jul 2023
I’m happy to announce that as of today, I have a new job title: Assistant Professor of History and Ainsworth Scholar in American Culture at Randolph College! This fall Randolph held a national search for a tenure-track position in US and Atlantic history, and thankfully they offered me the job! I will teach in the History Department and co-lead the American Culture program in 2023-2024 before transitioning to full-time in the History Department in 2024-2025.
I have really enjoyed working at Randolph this past year and am looking forward to this next phase. I have loved being back in the classroom, connecting with students, making new friends, and exploring new places with Maria Niechwiadowicz and our pup, Franklin. Moving and transitions are often challenging, and I’m so thankful to the many, many folks near and far who have supported and accompanied us on our journey thus far.
19 Sep 2022
A few weeks ago, I started my new job as the Ainsworth Visiting Assistant Professor of American Culture at Randolph College. You can read more about my new job in this New Faculty Q&A on Randolph’s website.
