Theodore Delwiche
Assistant Professor of Humanities
Biography
Theodore (Teddy) Delwiche is an Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Center for Humanities. He is an intellectual and cultural historian of early modern North America. He is also interested in the long history of the Latin language, especially from the fourteenth century to the present.
Much of his recent work has focused on the day-to-day realities and fine-grained practices of historical students, as well as the broader cultural questions that education invariably implicates.
Delwiche is the author of roughly 20 different articles, reviews, and chapters on, among other topics, early modern shorthand, student groups in early America, and the history of alchemy. He is currently revising his first monograph, The Contested Classics: Education in Early America, which is based on research in over fifty different archives. Pedantic and purposeful, reviled and revered, always dying yet somehow thriving, Latin and Greek learning have inspired and infuriated North Americans since grammar schools were first founded in Boston. The Contested Classics dives deep into the intellectual, cultural, civic, and social anxiety about classical education, charting America’s love-hate relationship with Greco-Roman antiquity.
Along with Jan Stievermann, he is also editing a forthcoming volume of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (c. 1000 pages), the first and most comprehensive biblical commentary produced in North America. This project opens a hidden world of transatlantic scholarship and inserts America into the fold of post-Reformation piety and erudition.
Originally trained as a classicist at Harvard College (A.B. 2018), Delwiche obtained an M.A. in early modern history at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in 2020, and a Ph.D. in early American history from Yale University in 2024. From 2024 to 2027, he was a postdoc at Heidelberg University’s Center for American Studies.
Current Projects
Delwiche’s current book project charts the untold history of Americans studying abroad from 1630 to 1900, before the days of Fulbright or Erasmus Mundus programs. How did studying overseas become such a defining aspect of modern education? How did the very idea that study, or knowledge, for that matter, could be commoditized and chalked up as a national good that could be traded, transported, imported and exported? And just what types of exchanges of ideas and cultures did study abroad actually engender?
Publications
“Transatlantic Charity and Classical Education at the Harvard Indian College,” History of the Humanities 10, no. 2 (2025): 311-338.
“The Extracurricular Classroom. Student Groups in Early American Colleges,” Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institute 87 (2024): 139-164.
“Shorthand and the Informed Public in Early American Politics,” Studies in Manuscript Culture 41 (2024): 157-178.
“Ezra Stiles and North America in the Early Modern Republic of Letters,” Modern Intellectual History 20 (2023): 27-61.
“Training for the Ministry: Shorthand and the Colonial New England Manuscript,” Huntington Library Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2022), 317-346.
“Masters of the Manuscript, Makers of Knowledge: Colonial New England Students and their Shorthand Notes,” Erudition and The Republic of Letters 7 (2022): 434-470.
“Shorthand Crosses the Atlantic: An Overview and Preliminary Census of Shorthand Manuscripts in Early New England,” Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 7.1 (2022): 187-203
“And why may not I go to College? Alethea Stiles and Women’s Latin Learning in Early America,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 70, no. 2 (2021): 305-318.
“Fuit ille non empiricus mercenarius: Apprehensions towards Alchemy in Colonial New England,” Ambix 67, no. 4 (2020): 346-365.
“The Schoolboy’s Quill: Joseph Belcher and Latin Learning at Harvard College c. 1700,” History of Universities 33, no. 1 (2020): 69-104.
“vilescunt in dies bonae literae: Urian Oakes and the Harvard College Crisis of the 1670s,” Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources 46, no. 1 (2019): 29-58.
“An Old Author in the New World: Terence, Samuel Melyen, and the Boston Latin School c. 1700,” The New England Quarterly 92, no. 2 (2019): 263- 292.