Charlotte Carrington-Farmer

Dr. Charlotte Carrington-Farmer is a Professor of History, and she specialises in early American History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2010, and she has a keen research interest in dissent in seventeenth-century New England. Her book, Roger Williams and His World, (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2024), sets Roger Williams in his wider Atlantic world context. She has published book chapters on two seventeenth-century dissenters, see: “Thomas Morton” in: Atlantic Lives: Biographies that Cross the Ocean (Leiden and Boson: Brill, 2014) and “Roger Williams and the Architecture of Religious Liberty,” in Law and Religion and the Liberal State (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020.) Building on her interest in Roger Williams, she has published an article on his wife, Mary Williams, entitled: “More than Roger’s Wife: Mary Williams and the Founding of Providence.” The New England Quarterly,vol. 97, no. 3, Sept. 2024: 308-44. 

Dr. Carrington-Farmer also has an active research interest in non-human animal history, specifically equine history. Her research examines the breeding and export of horses from New England to the West Indies in the eighteenth century, and its intersection with enslaved lives and labour. She has published a chapter entitled: “Trading Horses in the Eighteenth Century: Rhode Island and the Atlantic World,” in Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld, eds., Equine Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, 1700-Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), which won the Association of College and Research Libraries “Outstanding Academic Title” award in 2019. She has published an article entitled: “The Rise and Fall of the Narragansett Pacer,” Rhode Island History, Winter/Spring 2018, vol. 76, no. 1: 1-38. The article was accompanied by a travelling exhibition on the Narragansett Pacer horse through Rhode Island Historical Society. Her most recent research in the field of equine history centres on mules, see: “Shipping Mules in the Eighteenth-Century: New England’s Equine Exports to the West Indies,” in Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Lou Roper, Agnès Delahaye, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., Agents of Empires: Companies, Commerce, and Colonies 1500-1800, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2024.) Dr. Carrington-Farmer has a forthcoming chapter surveying equines in Atlantic history with Oxford University Press: “Horses in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Trevor Burnard, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025.) Her book manuscript in progress, which received a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium research grant, is tentatively titled: Equine Atlantic: New England’s Eighteenth-Century Horse Trade to the West Indies.

Dr. Carrington-Farmer has reviewed books for the Journal of American History, The New England Quarterly, Connecticut History Review, History: Reviews of New Books, Equine History Collective, and The American Historical Review. She has written pieces for The Junto, The Spectacle of Toleration, and Newport Historical Society blogs, and recorded podcasts for the Knowing Animals series. She was a featured historian in several episodes of the multi-award-winning documentary series, Slatersville: America’s First Mill Village, which premiered on Rhode Island PBS in 2022.

Dr. Carrington-Farmer teaches the following courses:

100-Level History Classes

• Making Global History

200-Level History Classes

• Colonial and Revolutionary America
•  Securing the American Republic

300/400-Level History Classes

• Mary Williams and her World: Women in the Seventeenth Century
• Crime and Dissent in Early New England
• Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
• Slavery in New England: From the Archive to the Public Realm
• Witchcraft in the Atlantic World
• Pirates, Sailors, and Whalers: America and the Atlantic World
• Reacting to the Past: Bringing History to Life
• Methods and Historiography (class and lab)
• Community Partnership Center History: Public History - Variable Topics

Interdisciplinary Seminars

• Roger Williams and his World (First Year Seminar)
• A Kingdom for my Horse: Human-Human Relations in Context (Senior Seminar)
• Enslavement and Freedom in New England: History and Legacy (Honours Community Engagement Seminar)

Dr. Carrington-Farmer is active in the field of public history and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Co-Lab fellow. In 2022, she co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for K-12 Educators, entitled “Ancient Stories, New Neighbours: Decolonising Indigenous Homelands and 17th-Century New England.” In the summer of 2023, she was part of the RWU team who received an institutional award with the CIC on the legacies of slavery and public history through Yale University and the Mellon Foundation. She has worked on several public history projects through RWU’s Community Partnership Center, including: 

• Rhode Island Slave History Medallions
• National Park Service: Underground Railroad Network to Freedom (with the Fall River Preservation Society)
• Plimoth Patuxet Museums
• King Philip’s War battle site project with Central Falls government
• Eighteenth-century house project with Newport Restoration Foundation
• Early oyster industry project with Warren community members
• General Burnside and the Civil War with the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society
• Early women in sailboat racing with the Herreshoff Museum

Dr. Carrington-Farmer uses ‘Reacting to the Past’ (RTTP) in her classes. RTTP involves elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by important texts in the history of ideas. This allows students to “live” in a particular historical moment and take control of the classroom. Dr. Carrington-Farmer was part of the RWU team who secured an Endeavour Grant to implement RTTP on campus, and she has run training sessions for faculty on the RWU campus, at different New England institutions, and national and international conferences.

Dr. Carrington-Farmer has won the following awards for teaching at RWU:

• Excellence in Teaching Award (2022)
• National Collegiate Honors Council, SPUR Award for Student-Faculty Research (2021)
• Hybrid Hero Teaching Award (2020)
• Alpha Chi Honors Society Faculty Recognition Award (2024, 2019, and 2018)
• Dr. Mark Gould Award for Commitment to Student Learning (2018)
• Faculty Ally of the Year, Multicultural Student Union Award (2018)
• Professor of the Semester, Student Senate Award (2017)
• Outstanding Contribution to Innovations in Teaching, Department of Instructional Design Award (2015)

Dr. Carrington-Farmer is a faculty advisor for the Foundation for the International Medical Relief of Children (Peru, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador sites) and Amizade (Navajo Nation site.)