Education

• Ph.D. University of Virginia, History
• M.A. University of Virginia, History
• M.A. Memorial University of Newfoundland, History
• B.A. University of Connecticut, History

Bio

Donovan Fifield is an Instructor of History at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on the economic and social history of colonial North America, the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and the American Revolution. His broader academic interests include American history through Reconstruction, constitutional history, global legal history, early modern imperialism, state formation, political economy, and comparative studies of financial crises. He is also committed to interdisciplinary scholarship and the application of the humanities and social sciences in public and professional contexts. At USC, he teaches courses on the American Founding Documents and early American history.

Fifield earned his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2024 with the dissertation Obligation & Tension: Credit, War, and Imperial Crisis in the British-American Northeast, 1688–1775. He also holds degrees from the University of Connecticut and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Before joining USC, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tübingen and has held research fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society.

Publications

Fifield, Donovan. “‘Our Own and Our Country’s Ruin’: Public Credit, War Markets, and Political Transition in the Colonial American Northeast, 1758–1768.” Studies in American Political Development 39, no. 1 (2025): 66–81.