Professor Calvert’s interests are in early modern Anglo-American religious and political history with her research focusing on Quaker political thought and founding father John Dickinson. Her monograph, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson, is the first of a trilogy of works on John Dickinson. It describes a hitherto unrecognized strain of Anglo-American political thought and action that explains the apparently contradictory stance that Dickinson took during the Revolution as an advocate of rights and liberty, but not independence or revolution. This study is the first analysis of Quaker constitutional theory; the first exploration of the origins of civil disobedience in Quaker political thought and action; and the first comprehensive exposition of Dickinson's political thought. The second work, in progress, is The Political Writings of John Dickinson, the first modern scholarly edition of his complete political works; and the third, also in progress, is Passions and Restraint: The Life of John Dickinson. 

Selected Grants and Fellowships

• SHEAR/Library Company of Philadelphia Fellowship, 2009.
• Library Fellowship, The David Library of the American Revolution, 2007.
• Association for Documentary Editing Travel Award, 2006.
• Robert L. Middlekauff Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2006.
• Library Residence Research Fellowship, American Philosophical Society, 2006.
• Monticello College Foundation Fellowship, The Newberry Library, 2005.
• Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2005 (declined). 
• NEH “We, the People” Summer Stipend, 2005.
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship
• Library Company of Philadelphia/Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2002.

Professional Services and Activities

• Editorial Board, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies
• Historical Consultant to the Board of the Friends of the John Dickinson Mansion, Dover, DE
• Consultant, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, for undergraduate primary source course readers in American civilization

• Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• “Liberty without Tumult:  Understanding the Politics of John Dickinson,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography vol. 132, no. 3 (2007): 233-62.
• “America’s Forgotten Founder: John Dickinson and the American Revolution,” History Compass, 5/3 (2007): 1001-1011, DOI 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00424.x. 
• “The Quaker Theory of Civil Constitution,” History of Political Thought vol. 27, no. 4 (2006): 586-619.
• “Political Obligation and Civil Dissent in Quaker Political Thought,” Quaker Religious Thought nos. 106/107 (2006): 68-7