Faculty Profile

I am a historian of slavery and emancipation interested in how Black people assert themselves in legal systems and within government agencies. My first book, "Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South" (forthcoming, Duke University Press), offers a new interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative. I chronicle the collective struggle of Black women seeking benefits from the U.S. government on the basis of their standing as the widows of men who served in the Union army during the Civil War. Their petitions and the first-person testimony of those who supported them paint a vivid picture of their lives and labors as free people in a society that continued to marginalize Black women on the basis of race and gender.

In my next book project, I will analyze the history, memory, and consequences of the Fort Pillow Massacre (1864) in African American life and history.

I earned my B.A. from Spelman College (cum laude), and a M.A. in African American Studies and a Ph.D. in United States History from the University of California, Los Angeles. My research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the North Caroliniana Society, the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Project at the University of Maryland, College Park; the Benjamin Quarles Humanities Institute at Morgan State University, and the Office of the Provost at Vanderbilt University.

I have also held fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and Case Western Reserve University. Before returning to Spelman College, I worked as an assistant editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland and taught at Vanderbilt University and Morgan State University.

Survey courses in women and gender history, African American history, and U.S. history

Undergraduate seminars on slavery and emancipation, Black women in U.S. history, and the afterlife of slavery in the U.S.

Field Specialties

African American History, African American Women’s History, and U.S. History

Book

Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Pension Bureaucracy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” Journal of Southern History 80:4 (November 2014): 827–58.

“‘Her Claim for Pension Is Lawful and Just’: Representing Black Union Widows in Late-Nineteenth Century North Carolina,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1:2 (June 2011): 207–36.

Encyclopedia Articles

Encyclopedia Entry, “Emancipation,” Enslaved Women in America, ed. Daina Ramey Berry (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 76–82.

Encyclopedia Entry, “Citizenship” and “Emancipation,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 13, Gender, ed. Ted Ownby and Nancy Bercaw (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 90–95 and 130–35.

Encyclopedia Entry, “Laundresses,” in "Black Women in America Encyclopedia," ed. Darlene Clark Hine, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2: 229–31.

Online Publications

Blog, “Reimagining the Lives of African American Union Widows in Post–Civil War America”

Book Reviews

Book Review of Talitha LeFlouria, "Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), "Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era" 15 (September/October 2016): 475–77.

Book Review of Mary Farmer-Kaiser, "Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation" (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), in "Journal of Southern History" 77 (November 2011): 999–1000.

Book Review of Thavolia Glymph, "Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), in "The Alabama Review" 63 (January 2010): 75–77.