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Scott Paul Gordon

Professor

610.758.3320
spg4@lehigh.edu
0035 - Drown Hall
Education:

PhD, Harvard, 1993

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Additional Interests

  • Early America
  • Transatlantic Eighteenth Century
  • Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing
  • Slavery and Freedom

Biography

Scott Paul Gordon came to Lehigh University in 1995 and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at Lehigh. He teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in early America and eighteenth-century transatlantic literature. He has served as chair of the Department of English (2011-2016) and as chair of the Department of History (2018-2019), and he has directed Lehigh’s First-Year Writing Program (2003-2006) and the Lehigh University Press (2006-2011). In 2002 Gordon received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and was named a Class of 1961 Professor for the years 2002-2004.

Gordon’s edition of the vast correspondence of Mary Penry (1735-1804), who immigrated from Wales in 1744 and lived as a single sister in Moravian communities at Bethlehem and Lititz for nearly fifty years, was published by Penn State University Press in 2018 as The Letters of Mary Penry: A Single Moravian Woman in Early America. His current research focuses on slavery and other forms of unfreedom in early Bethlehem and, more generally, on religion, social ambition, and patriotism in colonial and revolutionary Pennsylvania. In 2022 he wrote Tracing the Earliest Moravian Activity in the Mid-Atlantic: A Guide for the Moravian Historical Society and in 2010 he wrote Two William Henrys: Indian and White Brothers in Arms and Faith in Colonial and Revolutionary America, a study of the Delaware chief Gelelemend (1737-1811), for the Jacobsburg Historical Society. 

Gordon’s early projects focused on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature: The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640-1770 (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing (Palgrave, 2006).

Recent Scholarship

“Magdalene More’s Complaint (1784)” (with Josef Köstlbauer). Journal of Moravian History 24, no. 1 (2024): 56-79.

“Slavery in Bethlehem: Difference and Indifference in Northampton County’s Moravian Settlements.” Journal of Moravian History 23, no. 2 (2023): 77-128.

“Spangenberg’s 1760 Letter About Slaveholding in St. Thomas and Bethlehem” (with Josef Köstlbauer). Journal of Moravian History 23, no. 2 (2023): 143-156.

“A Moravian Rifle Goes to War: Disarming and Arming Pennsylvanians, 1775-1776.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 90, no. 2 (2023): 155-198.

Tracing the Earliest Moravian Activity in the Mid-Atlantic: A Guide. Moravian Historical Society, 2022.

“Yoked by Violence: The Paxton Boys, Representation, and a ‘humble Petition.’” Journal of Early American History 11, nos. 2-3 (2021): 169-192.

“Virtual Intimacies: The Networks of Mary Penry.” Women’s Studies (Special Issue: Women Writers Unbound: Early American Authors Beyond the Book) 50, no. 6 (2021): 572-596.

“Fishing for a Few: Moravians on the Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Frontier.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Special Issue: The Pennsylvania Frontier) 88, no. 3 (2021): 319-350.

“Mary Penry and the Politics of Singleness.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (Special Issue: Women and Politics) 144, no. 3 (2020): 262-289.

“Place and Print in the Paxton Crisis.” In Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga, by Lee Francis 4, Weshoyot Alvitre, and Will Fenton (Philadelphia: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2019), 73-74. 

“Lutherans in Lancaster, 1745-1746: The Diary of Laurentius Nyberg.” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 119, no. 4 (2019): 158-83. 

“The Trials of John Joseph Henry: The Politics of ‘Revolutionary Services’ in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 85, no. 3 (2018): 333-61.

The Letters of Mary Penry: A Single Moravian Woman in Early America. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Paperback reprint: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 

“Andreas Albrecht: Making Rifles in Eighteenth-Century Moravian Economies.” In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: The German-American Experience Since 1700, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2016), 113-39.

“The Paxton Boys and Edward Shippen: Defiance and Deference on a Collapsing Frontier.” Early American Studies (Special Issue: The Legacy of 1763: Reconsidering the Paxton Massacre and the War Called Pontiac’s) 14, no. 2 (2016): 319-47.

“The Gunmaking Trade in Bethlehem, Christiansbrunn, and Nazareth: Opportunity and Constraint in Managed Moravian Economies, 1750-1800” (with Robert Lienemann). Journal of Moravian History 16, no. 1 (2016): 1-44.

“Strength from Community: Single Sisters’ Choir Houses in Early Pennsylvania.” The Hinge: International Theological Dialog for the Moravian Church 21, no. 2 (2016): 2-28.

“Andreas Albrecht.” In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 1, edited by Marianne S. Wokeck. German Historical Institute. Last modified February 8, 2016. http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=263

“The Paxton Boys and the Moravians: Terror and Faith in the Pennsylvania Backcountry.” Journal of Moravian History 14, no. 2 (2014): 119-52.

“Jacob Dickert.” In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 1, edited by Marianne S. Wokeck. German Historical Institute. Last modified November 11, 2013. http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=180 

“Glad Passivity: Mary Penry of Lititz and the Making of Moravian Women.” Journal of Moravian History 13, no. 1 (2013): 1-26.

“Patriots and Neighbors: Pennsylvania Moravians and the American Revolution.” Journal of Moravian History 12, no. 2 (2012): 111-142.

“The Ambitions of William Henry of Lancaster.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136, no. 3 (2012): 253-284.

Two William Henrys: Indian and White Brothers in Arms and Faith in Colonial and Revolutionary America. Jacobsburg Historical Society, 2010. 

Teaching

ENGL 096: Conspiracy and Paranoia
ENGL 090: Bethlehem and Beyond
ENGL 304: Women and Revolution in Early America
ENGL 367: Indigenous Voices in the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century
ENGL 471: Slavery, Captivity, and the Archive in Early America