Alec Haskell received an A.B. in history from Princeton in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 2005. In the interim, he taught fifth and sixth graders in Chicago and worked for a non-profit organization that sought to reduce the Chicago public school system's then-exceedingly high dropout rates. His awards include a Jacob A. Javits Fellowship and an NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Before arriving at UCR, he taught at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the College of William and Mary. The book he is finishing- C ommonwealth Virginia: Rhetoric and the Creation of an Early-Modern Atlantic Polity - offers a new model for interpreting colonial British American politics by exploring the relationship between political rhetoric and the problem of polity-formation in one characteristic colonial society.
