Carla Gardina Pestana

Carla Gardina Pestana, Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World, studies the 17th and 18th century Atlantic worlds, especially the English Atlantic; the Caribbean; and U.S. religious history. She is the author of "The World of Plymouth Plantation" (2020).

Professor Pestana received her Ph.D. at UCLA in 1987 in early American history. Before joining UCLA’s faculty in 2012, she taught at The Ohio State University, Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Her first book, "Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts," considered illegal religious communities in New England’s less tolerant colony. "Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World" (2009), explored the religious transformation brought by English expansion into the Atlantic world. On the subject of empire, she authored "The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661" (2004), a study of the effects of revolutionary upheaval in England, Ireland, and Scotland on England’s nascent empire. She is also the co-editor with Sharon V. Salinger of "Inequality in Early America" (1991), a volume of essays honoring their dissertation advisor, Gary B. Nash. Also with Salinger, she compiled and edited a multi-volume collection of primary texts on the early English engagement in the Caribbean, for British publishing house Pickering-Chatto, entitled "The Early English Caribbean, 1570-1700." The Belknap imprint at Harvard University Press published Pestana’s "The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire."

Between 2016 and 2018, she blogged for the Huffington Post.