J.J. Nattrass

J.J. is a Ph.D. Candidate who studies Early America specialising in the Colonial era, Native Indigenous perspectives and cultures, and Early Modern transatlantic viewpoints. He is specifically interested in the role that religion played in both European and Native cultures across seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Having progressed into candidacy, J.J. has embarked upon the research phase of his dissertation project which will focus on Maine as place of contested power between English, French, and Native peoples across two centuries. The project will specifically focus on aspects of transculturation between Native American tribes and Europeans. J.J.’s primary historical interests for the project, and his wider research, place an emphasis on the importance of religion and faith as a lived experience (Protestantism and Catholicism, as well as Native Spirituality in this case) in borderland areas. Determined to create a complex and three-dimensional picture of colonial history, he is particularly focused on placing equal emphasis on researching and investigating the Native American world and European colonial societies.

J.J. recently received a funding package from the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research to help him complete work in the field for the project. He has already taken steps to present his work and ideas to his peers and the public, presenting a talk on his paper, “Reduced To Satan’s Ways: How New England’s Puritans absorbed and assimilated the sacred Native rite of scalping with God's blessing,” as part of a panel at the “Where is Early America?” conference at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies in May 2025. J.J. earned recognition from G.W.’s History department for this work, which awarded him The Howard M. Sachar Prize for Best Graduate Research Paper in the same month.

Prior to commencing his studies with Professor David J. Silverman at GWU, J.J. attained his M.A. in History as a department-funded international student at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He wrote his thesis on the ties between the Salem witch crisis, frontier violence, and Puritan providential belief. This project was supervised by Professor Nancy Rhoden and Professor Laurel Shire. It was developed with the help of funding awarded to him by Western's School of Social Sciences and an endowed prize from the History department.

Hailing originally from that most scenic of old-wold cities in the United Kingdom, York, North Yorkshire, J.J. worked as a news journalist and editor in both digital and print for a number of years before deciding to make a return to higher education and his first
love, History.