Professor Gallman is a historian of early North America, with a focus on borderlands, law, and the shared histories of Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and people of African descent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She teaches courses on these themes, from the pre-contact era to the U.S. Civil War. Prior to joining the faculty at LC, she held the 2017-2019 Barra Postdoctoral Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Specialty
Early North America, Borderlands, Law
Academic Credentials
PhD 2017, MA 2012 University of California, Davis
JD 1994 New York University School of Law
BA 1989 Yale College
Teaching
Fall 2025
HIST 232-F1: Histories of Indigenous Peoples in North America
HIST 400-01: Reading Colloquium
Research
Her current book project, Law’s Borderlands: Life, Liberty, and Property in an Old American South, is a legal history of the Florida borderlands during the revolutionary era. Her work reconstructs the complex legal world of the Florida borderlands to show how four legalities–Indigenous, Spanish, Africana, and Anglo–constituted a cosmopolitan legal order in this contested region at the turn of the nineteenth century. During the repeated upheavals of this period, cross-cultural law and justice served as a tool that many Indigenous people, Spaniards, people of African descent, and Anglo-Americans used, intentionally and unintentionally, to control local violence and stabilize their relationships in mutual opposition to the growth of the United States. Disputes over land, slaves, horses, and murder involved dynamic exchanges of legal ideas and practices among Indigenous peoples and immigrants from Europe, the United States, and Africa–all of whom depended on these shared experiences with law to bolster their alliances and block U.S. expansion into East Florida after the American Revolutionary War.
She is the author of “Unmaking an American Republic: Slavery, Constitutions, and the 1812 Invasion of East Florida” William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., 82, no. 4 (October 2025): 565-602 and “Reconstituting Power in an American Borderland: Political Change in Colonial East Florida” Florida Historical Quarterly 94 no. 2 (Fall 2015): 169-91. She is also co-author of “Covering Blood and Graves: Murder and Law in Imperial Margins,” in Justice in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America, 1600–1825: The Challenge of Legal Intelligibility, 1600–1825 (NYU Press, 2018).
Professor Gallman has received many research awards and fellowships, including support from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Philosophical Society, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the American Society for Legal History. In 2022, she was named a Fellow in American History by the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2025-2026, she received an Arnold L. and Lois. S. Graves Award in the Humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies and Pomona College in recognition of teaching excellence.
Public Writing and Media Commentary
“Unmaking an American Republic: Slavery, Constitutions, and the 1812 Invasion of East Florida” by Nancy O. Gallman, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 82, no. 4 (October 2025) 565-602
