Cornelia Dayton spent most of her childhood in Pennsylvania and Maine. In 1979 she graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College, magna cum laude in history and government. After receiving her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 1986 where she worked principally with Stanley N. Katz and John Murrin, Dayton held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship and assistant professorship at the Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary. She was on the History faculty of the University of California at Irvine between 1988 and 1997. She is currently working on the two book projects listed below. Since 2001, she has held several residential fellowships—at the Huntington Library in California; the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA; and the Univ. of Connecticut Humanities Institute.