Heather Carlquist Walser

Biography

Dr. Heather Carlquist Walser joined the University of Missouri in Fall 2026 and holds a joint appointment with the Department of History and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. She is a historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, specializing in politics and law. Her research explores how people in the United States and its peripheries imagined, understood, and worked out the contours of federalism and sovereignty, justice and the rule of law, constitutional meaning, and the evolution of rights and citizenship in the context of their everyday lives. She is particularly interested in understanding what governance was and how it functioned at a local level in the early United States.

Her current project, Negotiating Peace and Power: Amnesty in the Early United States, examines the role of amnesty in establishing peace after violent conflicts in the early United States. It demonstrates how government officials used amnesty as a tool of governance to resolve violent conflicts rooted in complex constitutional questions, project an image of federal power and sovereignty, and accomplish political goals throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also working on a project about the development of the “core constitutional powers” granted to the president in Article II of the Constitution and how the potential and uncertainty of constitutional limits shaped executive power and American politics.

Originally from Idaho, Dr. Carlquist Walser completed her BA and MA in History at the University of Oklahoma. She received her PhD in History at Pennsylvania State University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University before arriving at Mizzou.