Humanities Research Institute/Story and Place
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre of the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, as well as a fellow of the British Academy. She has written extensively on the history of Britain, gender, and empire, including Family Fortunes (1987), co-authored with Leonore Davidoff, Civilising Subjects (2002), Macaulay and Son (2012) and, with others, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). From 2009–16 she was principal investigator on the Legacies of British Slavery project. Her latest book is Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024).
Jennifer L. Morgan is The Silver Family Professor of History in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. She is the recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Award and is currently the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is the author of 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 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 at Yale University. She is also the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and 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 “Reproductive Racial Capitalism” in a special issue of History of the Present co-written and co-edited with Alys Weinbaum, and “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” in Small Axe. 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 The Eve of Slavery—a project about slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—a black woman who successfully sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656. In conjunction with that project, she serves as an Executive Producer for Key to Freedom, a narrative film project written and directed by her daughter Zinha Morgan-Bennett.