Rutgers

Graduate Student, History

School of Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: ‘Nobody couldn’t sell’em but her’: Slaveowning Women, Mastery, and the Gendered Politics of the Slave Market, 1820-1865.

About

I am a doctoral candidate in the African American History program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. I earned my M.A. in United States History from Rutgers-Newark and my B.A. in Psychology from Rutgers-Livingston College.

I will be joining the University of Iowa's departments of History and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies as an Assistant Professor of U.S. Women's History in the Fall of 2012.

I am interested in articulations of racialized and gendered power in slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction. My dissertation examines the ways in which white slaveowning women navigated the new economic and juridical terrain of the post-revolutionary South, the social and ideological implications of slaveownership for white women in the antebellum era, and their economic investment in the perpetuation of chattel slavery. My project also interrogates the ways that enslaved people conceptualized white slaveowning women's role in their bondage and how they came to understand their female owners' economic investment in the peculiar institution.