Liam Riordan

Research Interests

American Revolution

The Atlantic World in the Long Eighteenth Century

Public History

I have been a member of the History Department faculty at UMaine since 1997, and I began a term as Department Chair in 2025. My current major book project is about loyalists—those who opposed the rebellion that created the United States. My approach there is to focus on five individuals from very different corners of colonial society who each had good reasons to reject the patriots, especially as victims of rebel violence.

I teach all levels of students at UMaine. My entry-level classes are the first half of the US Survey to 1877 (HTY 103), an Introduction to Public History (HTY 205), and The Creation of the Atlantic World, 1450-1888 (HTY 240). My advanced undergraduate and graduate courses focus on early America (roughly to the 1830s) with an emphasis on social and cultural history.

I am currently a member of the Nominating Committee of the New England Historical Association, vice chair of the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission, Board member of the Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust in Orland, Maine, and active in the National History Day program for grade 6-12 students in Maine. I am a past Director of the University of Maine Humanities Center (2014-2016), now the McGillicuddy Humanities Center, and a past Board Member of the Maine Humanities Council (2010-2017).

Major Publications

  • What We Know, What We Wish: Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public History, co-editor with Richard W. Judd (McBride Professor, emeritus, University of Maine) published by the University of Massachusetts Press, 2025.
  • The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era, co-editor with Jerry Bannister (Dalhousie University) published by the University of Toronto Press, 2012.
  • Many Identities, One Nation: The American Revolution and its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Select Awards

  • Research Fellow, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Charlottesville, Virginia (2023)
  • Research Fellow, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (2022)
  • Maine Heritage Lecturer, awarded by College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Maine (2020)
  • Neal W. Allen, Jr., History Award from the Maine Historical Society (2020)
  • Outstanding Faculty Member, Service and Outreach, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Maine (2020)
  • Fulbright Scholar Award, University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom-United States Fulbright Commission (2012)