Ana Schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a scholar of early American literature whose research joins literary interpretation with the history of colonial New England. Unmoored, issued jointly by the Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, carries the subtitle The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America. The study examines how seventeenth-century Puritans treated sincerity as both an inward ideal and a public practice. Schwartz follows the consequences of that ideal through familiar writers and lesser-known people, including Indigenous and enslaved figures affected by English settlement. The book argues that efforts to display authentic belief could generate shame, resentment, and violence rather than the cohesion settlers imagined. Reviews gathered by UNC Press place the work across literary studies, history, and colonial historiography. Issued in 2022, Unmoored is Schwartz’s first monograph and shows her attention to the relation between language, self-fashioning, and power in accounts of early New England.