John Smolenski

Who is John Smolenski?

John Smolenski is an American historian, known for his anthropological approach to colonial American history. His first book, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania, looks at Pennsylvania’s turbulent early history as an example of the creolization process through which American colonists changed Old World cultural habits into New World cultural identities. This book represents one of the first attempts to use the creolization paradigm to analyze the development of the Anglo-American colonies. His published essays similarly draw upon concepts like performance theory and speech act theory popularized in the social sciences and cultural studies.

Smolenski is currently an associate professor of History at the University of California, Davis.