Fields of study: Canadian slavery, American north, Transatlantic Slavery, women and gender history, abolition and amelioration, settler colonialism, material culture/art history
Campus: Fredericton
Supervisors: Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson
Education: BA Hon. McGill 2017, MA Concordia 2019.
Working dissertation title: “Gender, Family, and Gradual Abolition in Upper Canada and Northern Slavery, 1760-1833”
My project unpacks the uniqueness of northern slavery and resistance in Upper Canada examining the impact of Loyalist slavery expansion on enslaved family life through a gendered and feminist perspective using a comparative analysis with other slave-minority demographic sites.
Combining art historical and historical approaches, I examine Upper Canada slavery through traditional written and printed archives alongside visual art and material culture. Through a focus on reproduction, family, and defiance, I extend the study of slave resistance to northern slavery where bondspeople engaged in unique forms of resistance in quotidian ways.
Debunking the myth of northern slavery as benevolent, I examine how gender and family were exploited throughout northern slavery and the age of abolition specifically via gradual emancipation laws. To wean Upper Canada from slavery, enslaved women’s reproduction after 1793 was legislated not to produce enslaved “chattel” children, but indentured servants bound to the same enslaver until the age of 25.
This dissertation disputes generations of scholars of northern slavery who have dismissively characterized children and pregnancy as unwanted “drains” on the economic viability of relatively smaller slave estates. Yet enslaved women’s reproductive potential via indentured children was legislated as the transitional process to freedom. This challenges our understanding of women and children in northern, slave minority-demographic spaces during the age of gradual abolition.
Publications
“‘PEGGY, not having his permission to absent herself from his service’: Enslaved Black Women’s Resistance and Defiance in Upper Canada Slavery” in Nah! On the Possibilities of Ongoing Refusals, Black Canadian Studies special issue of Journal of Canadian Studies eds. Janelle Joseph and Sephanie Latty, University of Toronto Press, 2024.
“Unravelling Slave Sites in Europe: Reconsidering Europe as a Temperate, Slave Minority Site and African-Diasporic Space, Through Counter-Commemoration” in Iconographies of Oppression?: Revisiting Europe and Africa’s Shared History Through Artifacts and Commemorations, edited by Maro Zoppi, 2024.
Book review
Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, Jennifer L. Morgan in Slavery & Abolition, 2024.