"They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South", with Dr. Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Dr. Stephanie Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, will discuss her book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale U Press, 2020).

This talk will occur remotely via Zoom. 

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Graduate students in history who attend will receive a copy of the book in advance. A short presentation about the book will be followed by a Q and A session and general conversation.

Dr. Jones-Rogers attained her graduate degrees from Rutgers University. Her research focuses primarily upon gender and American slavery, but she is equally fascinated with colonial and 19th century legal and economic history, especially as it pertains to women, systems of bondage, and the slave trade. Her first book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, is a regional study that draws upon formerly enslaved people's testimony to dramatically reshape current understandings of white women's economic relationships to slavery. The book is based on her revised dissertation, which won the Organization of American Historians' 2013 Lerner-Scott Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women's history. Currently she is working on two new projects. The first, entitled “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law, examines the ways that West African customs and laws influenced English thinking about matrilineal descent and may have influenced their decisions to implement matrilineal descent laws in their North American colonies. Her second project, “A Country so dreadful for a White Woman” reconstructs the lives of nearly 300 British women and girls who traveled to the African littoral on Royal African Company slave ships and settled in the company’s forts and castles before 1750.

This talk is part of a series on Gender, Race, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, presented by the History and Gender Workshop, and funded by a Faculty Research Seminar Grant from the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.