Race & Slavery
New Research: I am honoured to have been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at the University of Leeds in 2023 to work on my new book project on extra-judicial violence against the enslaved in Atlantic slave societies.
Publications
Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana
2020 • Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the most outstanding book on the subject of slavery, resistance, and/or abolition
2020 • Winner of the American Historical Association James Rawley Book Prize in Atlantic History
2020 • Co-Winner of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize in Gender & Sexuality
2021 • Winner of the Biennial Summersell Prize for the best book on the American South
2020 • Winner of the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize for best book in French Colonial History
2019 • Winner of the Kemper Williams Book Prize in Louisiana History
2020 • Co-Winner of the Summerlee Book Prize in Gulf Coast History
2020 • Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Social History Book Award
2020 • Shortlisted for the Kenshur Book Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies
2020 • Finalist for the ASWAD Sterling Stuckey Book Prize in African Diaspora Studies
Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700-1848
Edited by Sophie White and Trevor Burnard
This book focuses on alternative types of slave narratives, especially courtroom testimony, and interrogates how such narratives were produced, the societies (both those that were majority slave societies and those in which slaves were a distinct minority of the population) in which testimony was permitted, and the meanings that can be attached to such narratives. The chapters in this book provide valuable information about the everyday lives—including the inner and spiritual lives—of enslaved African American and Native American individuals in the British and French Atlantic World, from Canada to the Caribbean. It explores slave testimony as a form of autobiographical narrative, and in ways that allow us to foreground enslaved persons’ lived experience as expressed in their own words.
Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana
University of Pennsylvania Press / McNeil Series in Early American Studies, 2012, reprint 2014
Finalist, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize
Select Articles & Essays
2020
“Said, without being asked: Slave Testimony in French Louisiana,” in Sophie White and Trevor Burnard, eds., Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700–1848 (Routledge, 2020)
“Marion, Eighteenth-Century Natchitoches, Louisiana (US),” in Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, eds., As if She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 171-189
2019
“Dressing Enslaved Africans in Colonial Louisiana,” in Dressing Global Bodies: The Politics of Fashion in World History, 1600-2000, ed. by Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (Routledge, 2019)
2016
“A la française:” Amérindiennes et Africaines dans un couvent de la Nouvelle Orleans,” in Interculturalité: La Louisiane au carrefour des cultures, ed. by Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec and Natalie Dessens (Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2016)
2015
“Les Esclaves et le droit en Louisiane sous le régime français, carrefour entre la Nouvelle-France, les Antilles, et l'océan indien,” in Thémis Outre-Mer: Adapter le droit et rendre la justice aux colonies (16e–19e siècles), ed. by Eric Wenzel and Eric de Mari (Editions universitaires de Dijon, 2015)
“Lured in by the Archives,” Collections: A Journal for Museum & Archives Professionals, special issue on “Atlantic World Archives of Louisiana” 11:3 (Summer 2015)
“Creolized Frenchmen and Frenchified Amerindians in Louisiana,” in Creolization in the French Americas, ed. By Jean-Marc Masseaut, Jordan Kellman, and Michael Martin (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2015)
2014
“Français créolisés et Amérindiens francisés au pays des Illinois en Haute-Louisiane” in Cahier des Anneaux de la Mémoire/Shackles of Memory, special issue on “Créolités aux Amériques françaises” (2014)
2013
“Slaves’ and Poor Whites’ Informal Economies in an Atlantic Context,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. by Cécile Vidal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013): 141-70
“Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 70:3 (July 2013): 497-538
2012
“To ensure that he not give himself over to the Sauvages:” Cleanliness, Frenchification, and Whiteness,” Journal of Early American History 2 (July 2012): 111-149
2011
“Geographies of Slave Consumption: French Colonial Louisiana and a World of Things,” Winterthur Portfolio 44 (Fall 2011): 229-248
2003
“‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his neck, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans,” Gender & History 15: 3 (November 2003), 528-49