Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of early America, what she refers to as “Vast Early America,” from 2013 to 2021 she was the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Professor of History at William & Mary. Wulf earned her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University. She writes for public and academic audiences about early American history, the worlds of scholarship and scholarly publishing, and why footnotes can save democracy (really). The author or editor of prize-winning scholarship on gender, family, and politics, her new book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in 18th Century British America was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. She has served on a variety of non-profit boards; her current board memberships include the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Inc. and the National Humanities Alliance, she is a co-founder of Women Also Know History and a Vice-President of the American Historical Association. Her current research projects include writing a volume on Genealogy for Oxford University Press’s “Very Short Introduction” series, and a book about Esther Forbes, the author of Johnny Tremain.
