Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: West Africa, African diaspora, slavery, slave trade, Atlantic history, gender

About Me: I am a professor of history and, as of July 2018, chair of the history department at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I have taught since 1999. I was trained as a historian of Africa, and my dissertation/first book investigated changing gender relations under colonialism in southwestern Nigeria. I then began to focus on the Atlantic slave trade, and I published a textbook on that topic. Most recently, I published a “life and times” biography of a 19th century African American who made a life and founded a dynasty in West Africa, encountering and shaping some of the major dynamics in the Atlantic world. I have conducted research in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria (totaling about 2-3 years over the last 20), as well as Liberia, the UK, and the US; I have also spent time in South Africa, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Though I have not published on the topic, I am also interested in African pop music, especially from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Recent Publications

Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth Century Odyssey from America to Africa (UNC Press, 2017)
Biography and the Black Atlantic, co-edited with John Wood Sweet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
Captives as Commodities (Prentice Hall, 2008)
“Biography in African History,” History in Africa 44 (2017): 11-26
“The Autobiography of Jacob Von Brunn, from African Captive to Liberian Missionary,” Slavery and Abolition 37, 2 (2016): 446- 471
“Boundaries of Slavery in mid-19th Century Liberia,” in Paul Readman, Cynthia Radding, and Chad Bryant (eds.), Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 258-275
“Extraversion, Creolization, and Dependency in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 55, 2 (2014): 135-145

Expertise by Chronology: 18th century, 19th century, Early Modern, Modern, 20th century