Participant Info
- First Name
- Whitney
- Last Name
- Stewart
- Country
- (Country)
- State
- TX Texas
- Whitney.Stewart@utdallas.edu
- Affiliation
- University of Texas at Dallas
- Website URL
- Keywords
- American history, Atlantic world, African American history, race, material culture, public history
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am a historian of nineteenth-century America, race, and material culture. I am currently working on a book project exploring the role of slave dwellings in shaping a racialized ideology of home in the nineteenth-century United States. This project grew from my experiences exploring plantation tourist sites throughout the US South as a child and young adult, where the spaces and experiences of enslavement were ignored, romanticized, or segregated from that of the “Big House.” I wanted to know why, how, where, and when this interpretive schema arose, and thus seek to historicize this contemporary problem in our public history. I argue that the southern landscape we see on plantation tours today is a direct descendant of the racialized ideology of home that developed on those same plantations in the nineteenth century. The project also examines these sites as public history institutions, paying particular attention to interpretive and marketing schemes that continue or challenge the pernicious racialized ideology of home.
But my work goes beyond the academy. I am passionate about public history, about bringing the complexities of the past and the scholarly processes we use as historians to the public’s attention. I work with historic sites and museums, as well as with students, to find best practices for engaging, enlightening, educational, and ethical public history.
- Recent Publications
Co-editor, Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations: An Atlantic World Anthology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).
“Fashioning Frenchness: Gens de Couleur Libres and the Cultural Struggle for Power in Antebellum New Orleans,” Journal of Social History 51, no. 3 (February 2018), 526–56.
Review of Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom, by Julia O’Connell Davidson. HSlavery, H-Net Reviews (July 2017).
“The Material Culture of Freedom: African American Women and the Southern Free Black Home after the Civil War,” in Creators and Consumers: Women and Material Culture and Visual Art in 19th-Century Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest, The David B. Warren Symposium, vol. 5 (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2016), 46–58.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- @whitney_nell
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- North America
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Art & Architectural History, Material Culture, Public History, Race, Slavery
