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Contact: Vicki Hsueh, associate professor, Western Washington University’s Department of Political Science, (360) 650-2649 

BELLINGHAM – Western Washington University Associate Professor of Political Science Vicki Hsueh has written “Hybrid Constitutions: Making and Unmaking Power and Privilege in Colonial America,” published by Duke University Press, which explores the development of early American colonial documents.

The book examines the charters, constitutions and treaties of early America and investigates how these legal and political instruments were both affected and impacted by colonial encounters. 

“These documents played a central role in the relations and negotiations between Europeans and Native Americans on the ground in the colonies—and creation and revision of these documents was heavily shaped not only by colonial ambition but by a sense of insecurity, contingency, and limited knowledge and resources,” she said.

This more insecure and ambiguous origin of colonialism offers important resources for reconsidering and assessing contemporary indigenous claims in the U.S. and former settlers’ colonies, such as Australia and New Zealand.

This book is an extension of Hsueh’s dissertation on the relationship between British political theory and colonialism in the Americas; her research sent her to archival libraries in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as Oxford and London in the United Kingdom to examine colonial correspondences, journals and maps. 

Hsueh received her doctorate in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and has been in the Political Science department at �������� for the past seven years. 

For more information on the release of this book, contact Vicki Hsueh, �������� associate professor of Political Science, at (360) 650-2649 or Vicki.Hsueh@wwu.edu.