Ashli White is Professor of History at the University of Miami in Florida, where she specializes in early North America’s interactions with the wider world. She earned a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and a PhD from Columbia University.  

To date, most of her research has concentrated on the political, social, and cultural history of the age of revolutions. Her recent book is Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale UP, 2023), which analyzes the transnational circulation of objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. It reveals how millions of border-eliding things drew diverse actors into debates over freedom, equality, and solidarity, and they did so in uniquely visceral and provocative ways.In support of this project, she received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

White’s first book, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), demonstrates the far-reaching impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. Tracking the migration of thousands of exiles from Saint-Domingue to U.S. cities, the book shows how they shaped key aspects of American nation-building, influencing everything from philanthropy and politics to slavery and abolition. This book won the 2011 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut Français d’Amérique. 

White’s interdisciplinary research interests inform her teaching and other academic pursuits. She was Associate Curator of Antillean Visions: Maps and the Making of the Caribbean (Lowe Art Museum, February-May 2018), an exhibition that charted over 500 years of mapping the region. The exhibition’s multilingual catalog received the 2019 Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab Award (Category 2) from the American Library Association. At the University of Miami White offers lecture courses on colonial North America, the American Revolution, and the early U.S. republic and undergraduate- and graduate-level seminars on comparative slavery, the Atlantic world, material culture, and cartography.