Charlotte M. Gradie, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of History at Sacred Heart University. She is a historian of Latin America with interests in the early contact period. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Over the past years, Charlotte has distinguished herself with respect to teaching, scholarship, and service. As a scholar, Charlotte has been active publishing books, applying for and receiving grants, and presenting her work at many professional conferences. As a teacher, Charlotte has touched countless lives of students over the years through her Latin American History course along with the foundational core Western Civilizations courses. She has taught specialized courses on medicine, disease, and history that have attracted students from the natural sciences, health professions, and nursing. Charlotte has supervised dozens of senior theses projects. Alumni remember Charlotte fondly and current students speak highly of her.

Charlotte’s service to the University included many committees at the University and College level, twice as chair of the Department of History and on both the Rank and Tenure and University Research and Creativity Grant Committees multiple times.  She has maintained an active professional role in her field serving as Vice President of the New England Historical Association. Charlotte has led the coordination of the Connecticut History Day many times over the past two decades and has hosted a regional history competition on Sacred Heart University’s campus since 2016 which draws hundreds of middle and high school students to SHU. Charlotte also led multiple service trips to Guatemala for our students.

She is the author of the book, The Tepehuan Revolt of 1616, University of Oklahoma Press, which presents the unexpected four-year uprising as an crucial moment testing both the Spanish institutions of conquest and Jesuit evangelism. It also demonstrated the ongoing level of resistance among the Tepehuan. She argues that although Spanish colonial policies had shifted after 1590 from war and conquest to institutional dominance of daily life through the missions, the revolt resulted in Jesuits reasserting their position as social leaders and a reintroduction of the presidio system of government in Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja California, and Arizona.

She is also author of many journal articles and reviews.

Dr. Gradie received the Mellon Grant, Sacred Heart University's Research and Creativity Grant, and is a member of the American Historical Society, the New England Council of Latin American Studies, Conference on Latin American History, the American Society of Ethnohistory, the Haddam Historical Society, and Phi Alpha Theta.