Welcome to the website of Professor, Historian, and Author Sophie White!
ABOUT ME: I’m a Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame (USA). For my official faculty webpage, click here.
A native of Mauritius, I specialize in the history of early America and I focus on race, slavery & gender, with interests in material/visual culture and Atlantic/global research perspectives.
As an historian and an author, I am drawn to the challenges and rewards of applying innovative approaches to the study of the past. And just as I care passionately about reaching my students through my teaching, I care fervently about reaching as broad an audience as possible with my scholarship and writing.
My newest book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana has won seven book prizes, including the 2020 Frederick Douglass book prize and the 2020 American Historical Association James A. Rawley Book Prize. It will be published in French translation in 2024.
In addition to my books and articles on RACE AND SLAVERY, I am completing a DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECT, Hearing the Enslaved Speak in Colonial America.
I am also a specialist of MATERIAL & VISUAL CULTURE, and my next book is a global and genomic history of red hair—click on the REDHEADS tab to see why this interest in (red) hair and (freckled) skin fits right in to my research interests!
Among other awards, I am especially grateful to have been a recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, one for each of my books.
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Click on the images to learn more about….
My work on Race & Slavery
My Digital Humanities project on slave testimony for the Omohundro OI Reader
My most recent book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute, 2019)
Soon to appear in French translation with Karthala
Winner of 7 book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
My extensive work on Material & Visual Culture including my first book, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Penn Press, 2012)
My fabulous and intriguing new research on the global and genomic history of redheads!