Dr. Melissa N. Morris is a historian of early America and the Atlantic World whose research is centered on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She is particularly interested in the cross-cultural interactions that defined colonial encounters, the role of plants in driving European expansion, the dissemination of geographic and agricultural knowledge, and colonial failures in the Americas. She completed her PhD in history at Columbia University in 2017. Dr. Morris’s first book project, “Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Origins of Empires, 1580-1740,” considers how tobacco helped the Dutch, English, and French establish empires in the Americas. It looks in particular at how Europeans relied upon indigenous and Spanish assistance to learn to cultivate tobacco, a crop they grew in nearly all their early colonies.