Participant Info

First Name
Jennifer
Last Name
Palmer
Country
United States
State
GA Georgia
Affiliation
University of Georgia
Website URL
http://history.uga.edu/directory/jennifer-l-palmer
Keywords
family, race, gender, France, Caribbean, Atlantic World
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I research and write about race, gender, the family, the law, and property in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic, a time when all these highly contested categories were beginning to take their modern shapes.  I use intimacy as a lens to frame broad interdisciplinary questions about identity, relationships, and empire.

My first book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, follows the stories of people who built families and fortunes on both sides of the French Atlantic.  By focusing on family and household, the units that anchored France in the eighteenth century, I show interconnections among race, gender, colonialism, and the plantation system in the early modern period.

My current project, “To Have and to Hold: Women and Property in Atlantic France,” places the question of changing gender roles in a framework of social and legal history by examining property ownership among white women, indigenous women, and women of color in the French empire.  I have also published on representations of gender and race.

Recent Publications
  • Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).          *Winner of the 2017 French Colonial Historical Society Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize for the best book (in English or French) on French colonial history, through 1815.          
  •  “Women and Contracts in the Age of Transatlantic Commerce,” in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Daryl Hafter and Nina Kushner (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2015), 130-151.
  •  “The Princess Served by Some Slaves: Making Race Visible through Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Gender & History26.2 (2014): 242-262.
  •  “Writing Wills and Families: Constructing Mixed-Race Families in Eighteenth-Century France,” in “For the Salvation of my Soul”: Women and Wills in Medieval and Early Modern France, ed. Joelle Rollo-Koster and Katheryn Ryerson (St. Andrew’s, Scotland: St. Andrew’s University Press, 2012), 98-115.
  •  “What’s in a Name?  Mixed-Race Families and Resistance to Racial Marginalization in Eighteenth-Century La Rochelle,” French Historical Studies33 (2010):357-385.
Media Coverage
Country Focus
France, Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, Caribbean, France
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Colonialism, Family, Gender, Law, Pedagogy, Race, Slavery, Women