Ryan P. Langton (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Temple University. His dissertation traces how personal relationships—bonds of kinship, friendship, partnership, patronage, and alliance—informed the shifting process of cross-cultural diplomacy and the politics of empire along the Appalachian Mountains in the eighteenth century. Using geographic information system (GIS) software, his project centers Indigenous conceptions of diplomatic space and the interpersonal relationships that gave these spaces meaning to map the shifting networks connecting trans-Appalachian diplomats from Indigenous and European backgrounds, including men and women, traders and soldiers, elite politicians and enslaved people. Ryan received a B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. in History from the College of William & Mary.
Project: “Negotiating the Endless Mountains: Networked Diplomacy along the Eighteenth-Century Trans-Appalachian Frontier”