Ben Clingman

Advisor: Distinguished Professor Emerita Elizabeth Fenn • Ben is a fourth-year PhD candidate researching Indigenous and environmental histories of the early American West. His dissertation, tentatively titled Dreams of an Indigenous West: Migration, Sovereignty, and Nationhood in the Early American Midcontinent, focuses on Cherokees, Shawnees, Lenapes, and other Native peoples who, between the 1770s and the 1830s, emigrated from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to North American midcontinent—a vast region west of the Mississippi River encompassing much of present-day Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Ben’s research explores the multinational nations these Native migrants built, the political and diplomatic systems they constructed, and the radical futures they imagined for themselves in their new homes.

During the AY 2024-25 Ben is away from Boulder conducting archival research in Washington, D.C., London, and Seville. His work is generously supported by the History Department, the Graduate School, and the Center for British and Irish Studies at CU Boulder, and by the Darcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library.

Before moving to Colorado, Ben earned an MPhil in American history from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History from the University of Oxford, where he was advised by Profs Sarah Pearsall and Pekka Hämäläinen.