Paul Otto is an independent scholar who specializes in the history of early America and Native Americans. His past teaching includes courses on colonial America, the American Revolution, the African-American experience, southern Africa, and cultural history of science fiction, plus great books seminars on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

He earned a PhD in history from Indiana University, and has held fellowships with or received grants from Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute.

His books include The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (winner of the Hendricks Award), Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676-1677: Race, Class, and Frontier Conflict in Colonial Virginia, co-authored with Verdis LeVar Robinson, and Migrations and Borders in the United States: Discourses, Representations, Imaginary Contexts and Permeable Borders: History, Theory, Policy, and Practice in the United States, both co-edited with Susanne Berthier-Foglar.