My primary research agenda is to investigate the lives of African and African American chattel slaves from the era of the slave trade into the nineteenth century. My second level of inquiry focuses on the histories of Black women in America from enslavement to the contemporary moment. The multilayered threads of my research agenda are best captured in my forthcoming manuscript, Deliverance from the Chaldeans: Gender and Slave Manumissions in Maryland, 1770–1830 (part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, 1700–1900; Athens: University of Georgia Press). I am specifically interested in how gendered perceptions of productive citizenship influenced manumission patterns and, by extension, influenced the geographical and occupational mobility of enslaved and manumitted persons in the urban and rural environments of the Chesapeake from the American Revolution into the period of the New Nation.
My second book project builds on my interests in mobility, migration, and movement of enslaved and emancipated persons of African descent. The project begins in the mid-1700s, when the slave trade was at its height, and ends in the mid-1800s, when African resettlement campaigns in Africa, Canada, and the West Indies gained support. Titled Abandoned Lands and Abandoned Plantations: Migration and Mobility in the Afro-Atlantic, 1765–1865, this study builds on primary and secondary sources to offer a largely synthetic treatment of gender and the movement of Black bodies within the Atlantic world basin. With little exception, studies of enslavement tend to treat the British, French, and Spanish slave systems as separate fields of historical inquiry. I am concerned with the similarity and diversity of movement experienced by enslaved and emancipated persons within these transnational contexts.
At UC Irvine, I teach classes on United States history, as well as courses focusing on enslavement, gender, and sexuality in the African Diaspora.
Jessica Millward
Ph.D., U.S. History, University of California Los Angeles , 2003
Assistant Professor of History
African American, U.S., Women’s/Gender Studies
Department of History
253
Murray Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697.3275
tel:
fax: 949.824.2865
email: email: millward@uci.edu
Fields of Interest:
Comparative Slavery and Emancipation, African American History, the African Diaspora, Gender and Women, Law and Society
Publications:
Manuscripts in Progress:
Deliverance from the Chaldeans: Gender and Slave Manumissions in Maryland, 1770–
1830 (part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, 1700–1900; Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).
Abandoned Lands and Abandoned Plantations: Migration and Mobility in the Afro-Atlantic, 1765–1865.
Articles:
“More History Than Myth: African American Women’s History since the Publication of Ar’n’t I a Woman,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 161–167.*
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v019/19.2millward.html.
*Recipient of the Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Award for best article on African American Women’s History, 2007.
Reviews:
“Making Slavery, Making Race: The Experiences of Slave Women in the New World,” Review Essay, Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) in H-Atlantic (July 2005).
h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Atlantic&month=0507&week=b&msg=0efuux7D0UzGI4d89hrn7Q&user=&pw=.
Review Essay, Gad Heuman and James Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), in The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1 (Spring 2005).muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v006/6.1millward.html
Encyclopedia Entries:
“Manumission,” in Daina Ramey Berry, ed., The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States (Greenwood, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, forthcoming).
“Colonial America,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., pp. 286–291 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
“Tituba,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., pp. 248–250 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Academic Honors:
American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2006–2007
Lord Baltimore Fellowship, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 2004–2006
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, African-American Studies and Research Program, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003–2004
Nathan Huggins/Benjamin Quarles Dissertation Research Award, Organization of American Historians, 2003
Research Fellow, David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, Pa., 2001–2002
Service to the Profession:
Advisory Board, The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States (Greenwood, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, forthcoming).
Co-Chair, Southern Association of Women Historians’ Committee on the Status of African American Women in the Historical Profession
Professional Memberships:
Associate, Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture
Member, American Historical Association
Member, Maryland Historical Society
Member, Organization of American Historians
Member, Southern Historical Association
Life Member, Association of Black Women Historians
Life Member, Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Life Member, Southern Association of Women Historians
Courses:
Undergraduate:
History 40 B, The Formation of American Society: The Nineteenth Century
History 190/192, The African American Experience in Slavery