History of Women, Gender and Sexuality Seminar: Black Women’s Worlds in Antebellum America – A Panel Discussion

This panel considers the spatial and material worlds of Black women living in Antebellum America. Kelly Sharp’s work weaves together the thin documentary record with rich archaeological evidence to reconstruct the daily life and labor of women enslaved at the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, SC. Her paper exemplifies how house museums are beginning to incorporate the story of bondpeople in an authentic and transparent manner. Alisha Hines’s essay examines how enslaved and free black women negotiated power and place in the antebellum steamboat world. Hines argues that black women who were unmoored from plantation landscapes by way of the western rivers trouble prevailing tropes of gendered mobility and immobility that pervade scholarship on slavery in the United States.

The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.