Doctoral Student Fellow
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Project: Indian Trust Funds and the Routes of American Capitalism, 1795-1865
Emilie Connolly is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at NYU. Her dissertation, “Indian Trust Funds and the Routes of American Capitalism, 1795-1865” reconstructs the financial architecture of Indigenous dispossession in the nineteenth-century United States. The project argues that the practice of compensating Indian land cessions with trust funds enabled a strain of federal policy she calls “fiduciary colonialism”: a form of territorial acquisition carried out by gaining administrative control over Indigenous wealth. Emilie is currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, and in 2017-2018 was John E. Rovensky Fellow in Business and Economic History as well as a Consortium Dissertation Fellow of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has also drawn support from the Council on Library and Information Resources and Mellon Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.