About

Rachel Trocchio is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts, with a focus on early modern history, Jewish studies, and religious studies. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017 and holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University, obtained in 2005. Her research interests include 17th- through 19th-century American literature, Puritanism and Puritan literary studies, early modern studies, religion and cognition, and intellectual history. Trocchio has received several awards and fellowships, including the Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a summer grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a visiting postdoctoral research fellowship at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her scholarly work explores themes of memory, grace, loyalty, and religious identity within early American and early modern contexts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• History
• World Wide Web
• Library science
• Philosophy
• Classics
• Media studies
• Theology
• Religious studies
• Law

Selected publications

• The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards. Edited by Douglas A. Sweeney and Jan Stievermann. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. xx + 596 pp. £110 cloth.

  Church History · 2023-12-01

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• Giles Firmin and the Transatlantic Puritan Tradition: Policy, Piety, and Polemic. By Jonathan Warren Pagán. Leiden: Brill, 2020. vii + 318 pp. $138.00 hardcover.

  Church History · 2021

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  • History
  • Theology
  • Religious studies

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• 2019 International Conference on the American Revolution

  Early American literature · 2020-01-01

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• Lost Tribes East and West

  The New England Quarterly · 2020

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  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  August 01 2020 Lost Tribes East and West Rachel Trocchio Rachel Trocchio Rachel Trocchio is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Rachel Trocchio Rachel Trocchio is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2020 by The New England Quarterly2020The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2020) 93 (3): 382–400. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00843 Connected Content A correction has been published: Errata Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Rachel Trocchio; Lost Tribes East and West. The New England Quarterly 2020; 93 (3): 382–400. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00843 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 by The New England Quarterly2020The New England Quarterly Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Memory’s Ends: Thinking as Grace in Thomas Hooker’s New England

  American Literature · 2018-11-30

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  Abstract This essay examines the role of memory in the theology of first-generation New England divine Thomas Hooker. Drawing particular attention to Hooker’s application of imagistic and dialectical mnemonics in his well-known but controversial doctrine of “preparation,” it discovers a Puritan theory of grace that sought to come closer to God by escaping idolatrous thinking, on the one hand, and mechanistic cognition, on the other. Reconceiving Hooker’s preparation as a memorial style and placing that ars memoria at the center of transatlantic Puritan controversies about grace, the essay provides a new model for reading Puritanism not as the start of an American telos but at the end of a European intellectual inheritance.

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• American Puritanism and the Cognitive Style of Grace

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

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  The present monograph initiates the lapsed possibility that Puritanism in the New World was an endpoint, rather than an origin, by contextualizing Puritan cognitive and literary styles within a history of the “craft of thought” that stretched from antiquity to the Renaissance. New England divines Thomas Hooker, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, I argue, applied imagistic, linguistic, and mathematical models for thought in an effort to meet the vexed imperative of moving closer to God in a predestinarian theology that held one’s grace had already been determined. Why acts of thinking should serve to navigate this explicitly Puritan ordeal, I also contend, proceeds from the fact – largely unrecognized by either Puritan studies or cognitive literary studies – that many of the fields we today designate as cognitive sciences were first understood as cognitive arts. Plotting a correspondence between acts of creative thinking and a distinctly Puritan concept of grace, I show that the Puritans were radially more creative than we may have realized, precisely because they forged out of a long and diverse intellectual heritage an art – what I term a ‘cognitive style’ – that mediated between intellection, representation, and belief. Memorial, copious, and infinitary ‘styles of thinking,’ I contend, discern American Puritanism at the juncture of British intellectual history, Anglo-American lived experience, and Calvinist doctrine. When first-generation New England divine Thomas Hooker uses both imagistic and dialectic models for the memory to explain the spiritual potency of recollection, he composes what was known as the doctrine of preparation as a memorial art. To read preparation as this cognitive style is to grasp how the program joined intellection and grace. When Cotton Mather collates ecclesiastical and personal confessions with the conclusions of a 1662 Massachusetts synod, he models copia to insist that the synod’s expansion of church membership was not dangerous innovation but a recombination of orthodox policy. Mather’s use of this style reconceives the Halfway Covenant as a literary rather than socio-political event. And Jonathan Edwards, trying to staunch social ills flowing from revivals in the Connecticut Valley that had become ungovernable, appealed to contradictory accounts of the infinitesimal to reconcile the Calvinist tenets of predestination and conversion. Grounding his responses to the revivals in this mathematical epistemology, Edwards evinces a knowledge of God that was both Enlightened and Awakened, because it took the form of a leap between mystery and sense. Tracing these intellectual movements and the corollary literary modes they imparted across Hooker’s sermon literature, Mather’s ecclesiastical history, and Edwards’ philosophical theology, I show that a Puritan theology of grace comes into view when we attend to the style Puritanism engendered, both of rhetoric, and through rhetoric, of thought.

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• Cause and Defect: Peter Oliver’s Subjunctive Loyalism

  Early American literature · 2017-01-01

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  Cause and DefectPeter Oliver’s Subjunctive Loyalism Rachel Trocchio (bio) One of the piquancies of reading Peter Oliver’s 1781 Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion lies in its manner of insisting that at any number of points the Revolution could have been averted, or staunched. “It is much to be deplored,” Oliver laments at the outset, “that the Springs of the English Government too often lost of their Elasticity; which, perhaps, had they have been in many Cases wound up, would have had Force enough to have prevented the present Rebellion” (26). Hardly have we gone past the gate—the “Porch,” as Oliver figures his introduction (9)—than we are presented with these weltering conjugations of the verb to be: had they have been; would have had; elsewhere it may or it must; otherwise I hope or I promise. These phrases, I will suggest, ask us to entertain an alternate history, in which the mechanisms of British imperial power were effectively discharged, and the Revolution was cut off at the root. Reality being what it is, or was, such cognitive play cannot endure. Oliver did not, after all, claim to write a fiction but a history of the Rebellion, in which “I promise . . . that I will adhere most sacredly to Truth, & endeavor to steer as clear as possible from Exaggeration; although many Facts may appear to be exaggerated, to a candid Mind, which is always fond of viewing human Nature on the brightest Side of its Orb” (9). In light of his affiliation with the losing side and the events of his personal history,1 Oliver’s use of the subjunctive rings melancholic. His phrases splinter wit into woeful protest, whether they appear as an avowal (“I promise”) or take the form of an apology to an idealism so bewildered by the late turn of events as to believe they “may . . . be exaggerated.” That such a well-nurtured colony has descended into rebellion, “this surely, to an attentive Mind, must strike with some Degree of Astonishment; & such a Mind would anxiously wish for a Veil to throw over the Nakedness of human Nature” (3; emphasis added), Oliver tolls, with a moral urgency that foregrounds the relatively un-controversial claim with which I begin: the subjunctive is the fundamental verbal mood underlying Oliver’s “Tory View.” [End Page 559] This essay considers the nature and effect of Oliver’s style in the Origin and Progress as a point of entry into the larger phenomenon of subjunctive Toryism. Particularly, it argues that Oliver’s subjunctives constitute a distinctive mode of Loyalist historiography that fashions new forms of Loyalism exactly insofar as they concede the reality of Loyalism’s loss. Here, for example, is how Oliver begins his “portrait” of John Hancock: His Mind was a meer Tabula Rasa, & had he met with a good Artist he would have enstamped upon it such Character as would have made him a most usefull Member of Society. But Mr. Adams who was restless in endeavors to disturb ye Peace of Society, & who was ever going about seeking whom he might devour, seized upon him as his Prey. (40; emphasis added to subjunctive phrases) Given Loyalist suspicions about the mutability of language, and given, as Edward Larkin reminds us, that Oliver chronicles Patriot use of shape-shifting rhetoric (“Seeing through Language” 428–29), it is striking that Oliver’s character sketch should dwell in a grammatical mood generally understood as world opening. As a range of linguists, anthropologists, cultural historians, and literary critics have told us, the subjunctive is deployed for the making of both lived communities and possible worlds.2 A normative instance of the mood occurs in the Declaration of Independence, whose concluding lines state that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States . . . and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved.” Technically a modal auxiliary verb with the infinitive to be, ought here represents the present subjunctive: it posits an “otherwise” to a nonideal world. In stating that alternative, Jefferson’s language insists that it has already come to pass. For the...

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Awards & honors

• Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society (APS…
• Summer grant, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 2…
• Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Beinecke Rare Boo…
• Summer research grant, Berkeley Center for the Study of Reli…
• Barra Dissertation Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early Ameri…