History of the Black Atlantic World; Comparative Slavery, Gender and sexuality studies.

Jennifer L. Morgan
Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History
Education
- 1995 Ph.D in History, Duke University
- 1986 B.A. in Third World Studies, Oberlin College
Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and
Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of the Reckoning
with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic
(Duke University Press, 2021) which won the Mary Nickliss Prize in Women’s
and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians and the
Frederick Douglass Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study
of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; and of Laboring Women: Gender and
Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004). She is the the co-editor of Connexions: Histories
of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her research
examines the intersections of gender and race in in the early modern Black
Atlantic.
Her recent journal articles include “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and
Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” in Small Axe; “Accounting for ‘The Most
Excruciating Torment’: Trans-Atlantic Passages” in History of the Present and
“Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism” in Social Text. In addition to her
archival work as an historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race,
gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black
Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black
Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007).
She is currently working on a study of slavery and the emergence of “private life”
in the Early Modern English Atlantic world; and a project about slavery and
freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—the black
woman who sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656.
Morgan serves as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early
American History and Culture. She is the past-Vice President of the Berkshire
Conference of Women Historians and is a lifetime member of the Association of
Black Women Historians. She lives in New York City.
Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, Association for the Study of the World Wide African Diaspora; Association of Black Women Historians
Books
-
Duke University Press, 2020
-
Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in Americaedited with Jennifer Brier and James DownsUniversity of Illinois Press, 2016
-
Afterward, Women in Early Americaed. Tom FosterNew York University Press, 2014
-
Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World SlaveryPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004
“Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe, Volume 22, Number 1, March 2018 (No. 55), pp. 1-17. (Duke University Press).
“Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment:’ Trans-Atlantic Passages,” History of the Present 6 (Fall, 2016): 184-207.
“Periodizing Problems: Race and Gender in the History of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Summer, 2016): 351-57.
“Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism: An Afterword,” Social Text 33 (2015): 153-161.
“Gender and Slavery, Life and Death on Atlantic Plantations,” William and Mary Quarterly72 (October, 2015): 676-79.
“Gender and Family Life,” in The Slavery Reader, ed. Trevour Bernard and Gad Heuman (New York: Routledge, 2010).
“Experiencing Black Feminism,” in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed. Deborah Gray White, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007).
“Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, LIV (January 1997): 167-92.
Contact Information
Jennifer L. Morgan
Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History jennifer.morgan@nyu.edu 20 Cooper Square, 4th FloorNew York, NY 10003
Phone: (212) 998-2135
Office Hours: Tuesdays 11:00-1:00pm