The Junto is happy to announce the addition of Sara Damiano, a PhD candidate in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University, to the blog’s membership.

Her research “links gender, economic and legal history in order to investigate the operation of gendered power within social institutions in early America and the British Atlantic World.” Her dissertation, “Gender, Law, and the Culture of Credit in New England, 1730-1790,” systematically analyzes women’s and men’s involvement in formal and informal credit practices and debt litigation in New England’s largest ports, Boston and Newport. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, she investigates how and why women’s involvement in credit transactions and debt litigation changed during the eighteenth century. Sara also just recently had an article published in the March 2013 issue of The New England Quarterly, “‘To Well and Truly Administer’: Female Administrators and Estate Settlement in Newport, Rhode Island, 1730–1776.”

She is also currently a dissertation fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (along with fellow Juntoist, Michael Blaakman). After contributing two guest posts this summer, Sara has now become the first non-founding member of The Junto. We hope everyone will join us in welcoming her to the blog.