Sarah M.S. Pearsall | History | Johns Hopkins University

Sarah Pearsall’s scholarship and teaching center on how transatlantic and indeed global movements intersected with personal and intimate lives for all kinds of early Americans, whether protestors, spouses, or letter-writers. She relishes introducing students and readers to the many fascinating characters populating the landscape of early America, a place at once distant and strange yet also uncannily familiar.

Pearsall’s fourth book, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, is out in May 2026 with Knopf Doubleday (USA), Picador (UK), and Rowohlt Berlin (Germany). Most international histories of the American Revolution have considered the effects of the American Revolution on the wider world. Pearsall instead focuses on the effects of the world on the American Revolution. She traces how a range of different individuals—including but not limited to leaders, diplomats, and generals— in places as distant as Bkejwanong, Kolkata, and Anomabu influenced that famous course of human events. This book emerged from a course she designed at Cambridge University (where she taught for nearly a decade before moving to Johns Hopkins in 2021, where she still teaches it).

Pearsall developed her interest in global history through writing Polygamy: A Very Short Introduction for the Oxford University Press series (2022). In this little book covering thousands of years of world history, Pearsall explored the intersections of plural marriages and the dynamics of power, gender, rank, race, and religion. This book built on archival research she had done for Polygamy: An Early American History (Yale University Press, 2019), in which plural marriages center an analysis of colonialism and slavery, as well as cultural and religious encounters, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The book examines the ways in which Americans and others have struggled over who has the right to engage in, regulate, and define marriage. It received Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in American Social History and was named as a finalist for the Mary Nickliss Prize for Most Original Book in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History (Organization of American Historians).

The intersection of the political and the personal, as well as an abiding interest in the American Revolution, animate Pearsall’s first book, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2008), which was awarded the Women’s History Network Prize.

Pearsall’s articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the William and Mary Quarterly, Gender and History, the Journal of Early Modern History, and Cultural and Social History. One of them received the Arrell M. Gibson Award and the Jensen-Miller Award from the Western Historical Association. She has also co-edited Special Issues for both the William and Mary Quarterly and Gender and History.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Library, the Newberry Library, the British Academy, the Huntington Library, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, among others, have generously supported Pearsall’s research for which she is so grateful.

Pearsall is a Fellow of the Historical Society (UK). She also serves on the Editorial Board of Johns Hopkins University Press as well as the editorial collectives for Reviews in American History and Gender and History. A former editor, she remains on the Advisory Board for the Historical Journal.

Pearsall welcomes enquiries from students interested in North American history, ca. 1000-ca. 1800.

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