Fellowship at Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History (Fall 2024 – Spring 2025)

09 Sep Fellowship at Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History (Fall 2024 – Spring 2025)

I was fortunate to be awarded this fellowship to return (finally) to my book project, which pieces together the “history” of a family of global ancestries, and its ties to Chesapeake landscapes, from the colonial era to Reconstruction.  Lives entwined by converging diasporas from Africa, the Indigenous Americas, and the Indian Ocean basin with immigrations from Europe.  The stories of these people (free, indentured, enslaved, and enslaving), and of this land, are entangled with colonial settlement and the early plantation revolution on mainland North America, with the development of commercial slavery and laws defining “race,” with migrations by force and by choice, and with emergent populations of free people of color more than a century before the Civil War.  Such people navigated the edges between freedom and bondage across generations.