Nicole Gilhuis

Biography

Nicole Gilhuis received her PhD in history from University of California, Los Angeles. Gilhuis is joining the Humanities and Teacher Education Division as an assistant professor of history. Trained as an Atlantic historian, her research focuses on history of the Atlantic from the 16th- to the 18th-century with a special focus on African, Native American, and European commoner histories.

Gilhuis' research explores the contacts and entanglements of European and Native American peoples throughout the Early Modern Americas. Her dissertation, Atlantic Ghosts: Mi’kmaq Adoption, Daily Practice & the Rise and Fall of Colonial Revenants, 1600-1763, integrates both European and Native sources which have until now been kept separate in the study of Acadian history (in what is now Maine and the Canadian Maritimes). This interdisciplinary research draws upon archaeology, court records, and maps, as well as relying on Native American fishing practices to locate the “colonial ghosts” on the Atlantic coast between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Education

• Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 2020