2026 Harington Fellow
John Kuhn
John Kuhn is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY-Binghamton and Director of the university’s Humanities Institute. He reads, writes, and teaches about early modern English literature and history.
His first book, Making Pagans (UPenn 2024), provided a new history of the links between popular culture and the study of non-Abrahamic religions in early modern England. His more recent work focuses on indigenous technology’s intercultural movements and impacts in the 17th and 18th centuries. This project has included articles examining the adoption of featherwork and hammocks by Europeans.
He is working on a larger-scale book project in the same vein, which looks at the complicated, hybrid histories of the birchbark canoe in the two centuries after colonization began. Settlers, whose own boat technologies could not handle the swampy, water-filled landscapes of northern North America, turned en masse to this Indigenous craft.
The Harington Fellowship will allow Kuhn to spend time doing research in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives. There, Kuhn will look for more evidence about the company’s famous canoes: the supply networks and Indigenous alliances used to initially procure them, the training and skills necessary to operate them, the origins of their decorative painted elements, and the HBC’s attempts to cut out indigenous makers and produce them ‘in house’.