The Chair Guy
I'm guessing it's Neil D. Kamil, who is currently an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
I figured this out by doing a keyword search of Dissertation Abstracts:
Title: WAR, NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, AND THE METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ARTISANAL THOUGHT IN AN AMERICAN MID-ATLANTIC COLONY: LA ROCHELLE, NEW YORK CITY, AND THE SOUTHWESTERN HUGUENOT PARADIGM, 1517-1730
UMI Pub No: 8908118
Author: KAMIL, NEIL DUFF
Degree: PHD
School: THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Date: 1989 Pages: 694 Source: DAI-A 50/02, p. 531, Aug 1989
Subject: HISTORY, UNITED STATES (0337); HISTORY, EUROPEAN (0335); HISTORY OF SCIENCE (0585); FINE ARTS (0357)
Abstract: Early New York historiography has been limited by enduring frameworks which reduce the seventeenth century to 'Dutch' and 'English' periods, or paradoxically support the notion that because New York Colony was more heterogeneous and polyglot than other colonies, its cultural, social, and political relations were excessively chaotic and factious as a result. The colony has also been traditionally understood as one dimensional in pursuit of commercial enterprises, with religious concerns playing a decidedly secondary role in the culture. This dissertation attempts to revise and mitigate these historiographical frameworks with a largely artifactual history of woodworking artisans in pre-Revolutionary New York City. Its parallel objective is also to identify and elucidate the interaction between late Medieval and early Modern European artisanal paradigms--rooted in millennialist thought, Reformed religious enthusiasm, and natural philosophy--and the mental and material world of a pluralistic, urban, mid- Atlantic colony. The dissertation focuses on French Huguenots who emigrated to New York Colony in substantial numbers from Aunis-Saintonge in southwestern France throughout the seventeenth century. This craft network functions as a paradigm disseminator; that is, as the bearer of an important material-holiness synthesis derived ultimately from the Germanic-Paracelsian tradition. Part one identifies the tradition's origin in Saintonge through a close reading of the writings and ceramic production of the Huguenot Bernard Palissy of Saintes--generated in response to the mimetic violence of the Saintongeais Civil Wars of Religion--and his sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artisan followers. Part two traces the Palissien paradigm to New York, where it is carried by Saintongeais refugee woodworkers and modified in response to the colonial context. The dissertation therefore addresses the forms of enthusiastic materialism taken by a marginalized artisanal subculture set in motion (indeed, animated) by religious violence, to reconstruct the remnants of their 'dispersed' culture in colonial New York. It aligns with an ongoing effort to reinterpret the problem of religiosity in early American culture, and concludes that religiosity might be found in private refuges and disguised by the materials and domestic artifacts of everyday life.