Evan Turiano is a historian interested in slavery, civil rights, politics, and law in the United States and Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2022.
He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Wesleyan University's Center for the Study of Guns and Society. At the Center, he is working on a groundbreaking project examining the "history and tradition" of firearms, gun culture, and weapons regulation in five states in order to model how historians can participate in law and policymaking in the Bruen era. At Wesleyan, he is also an affiliated faculty member of the Departments of History and African American Studies.
Additionally, Evan is working on a book manuscript, under advance contract with LSU Press's "Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World" series, which examines the contested legal rights of African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves from before the American Revolution through the onset of the Civil War. His research offers a new origin story for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and demonstrates new connections between freedom seekers and the coming of the Civil War.
His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, and he has reviewed books in the Journal of Southern History, American Nineteenth Century History, Pennsylvania History, and other venues. His public writing has appeared in The Washington Post's Made By History and Jacobin. He is a contributing editor at The Gotham Center for New York City History.
His dissertation has received numerous national awards and accolades. It received the 2024 Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Prize (Abraham Lincoln Association and the Abraham Lincoln Institute), the 2023 Rachel Hines Prize (College of Charleston Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program); and the 2023 Bradford-Delaney Dissertation Prize from the St. George Tucker Society. Additionally, it was a finalist for the Southern Historical Association's C. Vann Woodward Award.
His research has been supported by fellowships from Yale University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the John Carter Brown Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and the University of Virginia's Nau Center for Civil War History.
Before coming to Wesleyan, Evan was the Macaulay Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY, where he taught courses on US History, African American History, and Legal History from 2017 to 2023.