Staff Profile:Professor Emily West
- Name:
- Professor Emily West
- Job Title:
- Professor
- Responsibilities:
Research Division Lead for History Department
Teaching
Part One: Contribution to core modules; Part 1 Option: Women in American History: From Slavery to Second Wave
Part 2 Option: The American Dream? US history from Colonial Times to the Late Twentieth Century (co-taught with Dr Mara Oliva)
Part 3 Option: 'Race', Ethnicity and Citizenship in America Special Subject: Slavery in America
Postgraduate Teaching
Contribution to the MA in History: Archival Silences; Option: Slavery and Gender in the US
Postgraduate Supervision
I have supervised many MA dissertations and have supervised four PhD students to completion. I currently have four further PhD students. I welcome applications from students interested in my research areas, including those wishing to study remotely from the US.
- Areas of Interest:
I am broadly interested in issues of race and gender in American history and my research focusses on US slavery in the US South, especially the lives of enslaved women, the relationships between enslaved spouses, family life under enslavement, and affective ties between enslaved people and free people of colour.
More recently, I have published on enslaved wetnursing and been Co-I on an AHRC-funded network exploring enslaved women's motherhood across the Atlantic world. My new project focusses on food, power and resistance under American slavery
- Research groups / Centres:
Member of the University's Gender History Research Cluster:
Editorial board memberships: Slavery and Abolition and Civil War History
- Publications:
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YNumber of items: 25.
2021
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West, E.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3444-3814
(2021)
‘We chilluns, long wid her, wuz lak de udder slaves’: free black families and quasi-slavery in the pre-Civil War US South.
Journal of American Studies.
ISSN 1469-5154
doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875820001735
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West, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3444-3814 and David, S.,
(2021)
Hidden voices: the lives of enslaved women in the Lowcountry and the South.
United Kingdom.
Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, Charleston, South Carolina.
2020
- Clinton, C. and West, E. (2020) Gender and sexuality in the Old South. In: Thompson Friend, C. and Glover, L. (eds.) Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. ISBN 9780807172568
- West, E. (2020) Nominal slavery, free people of colour, and enslavement requests: slavery and freedom at the ‘edges’ of the regime in the antebellum South. In: Aje, L. and Armstrong, C. (eds.) The Many Faces of Slavery: New Perspectives on Slave Ownership and Experiences in the Americas. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 199-210. ISBN 9781350071421 doi: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350071452.ch-013
2019
- West, E. (2019) The union of enslaved couples during the disunion of the nation: love, discord and separations in US slavery and thereafter. In: Grey, D. and Gregory, J. (eds.) Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century. Routledge, London. ISBN 9781138354302
- Cowling, C., Machado, M. H. P. T., Paton, D. and West, E., eds. (2019) Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies. Routledge, pp376. ISBN 9780367202026
2018
- West, E. (2018) Reflections on the 'History and Historians' of the black woman's role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence. American Nineteenth Century History, 19 (1). pp. 1-22. ISSN 1466-4658 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2018.1429333
- West, E. and Shearer, E. (2018) Fertility control, shared nurturing, and dual exploitation: the lives of enslaved mothers in the antebellum United States. Women's History Review, 27 (6). pp. 1006-1020. ISSN 1747-583X doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2017.1336849
- Cowling, C., Machado, M. H. P. T., Paton, D. and West, E., eds. (2018) Mothering slaves: motherhood, childlessness and the care of children in Atlantic slave societies. Women's History Review (special issue), 27 (6). Taylor and Francis. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2017.1336832
2017
- Cowling, C., Machado, M. H. P. T., Paton, D. and West, E., eds. (2017) Mothering slaves: comparative perspectives on motherhood, childlessness, and the care of children in Atlantic slave societies. Slavery & Abolition (special issue), 38 (2). Routledge, pp. 223-231. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1316959
- West, E. and Knight, R. J. (2017) Mothers’ milk: slavery, wet-nursing, and black and white women in the Antebellum South. Journal of Southern History, 83 (1). pp. 37-68. ISSN 0022-4642 doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2017.0001
- West, E. (2017) African Americans; Chinese Exclusion Acts; Frederick Douglass; Emancipation Proclamation; Freedmen's Bureau; fugitive slave laws; slave revolts; Nat Turner; Underground Railroad. In: Stevenson, J. and Cook, C. (eds.) The Cambridge Dictionary of Modern World History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9780521847711 doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511842740
2014
- West, E. (2014) Enslaved women in America: from colonial times to emancipation. African American History Series. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, USA, pp160. ISBN 9781442208711
2013
- West, E. (2013) 'Between slavery and freedom': the expulsion and enslavement of free women of colour in the US South before the Civil War. Women's History Review, 22 (3). pp. 460-477. ISSN 1747-583X doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2012.726126
- West, E. (2013) Free People of Color: expulsion and enslavement in the Antebellum South. In: Link, W. A., Brown, D., Ward, B. and Bone, M. (eds.) Creating citizenship in the nineteenth-century South. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 64-83. ISBN 9780813044132
2012
- West, E. (2012) Family or freedom: free people of color in the antebellum South. New Directions in Southern History. University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, Kentucky, USA, pp256. ISBN 9780813136929
2010
- West, E. R. (2010) "He come sometime widout de pass". Rethinking Cross-Plantation Marriages and Enslaved Families in Antebellum South Carolina. In: Thompson Friend, C. and Jabour, A. (eds.) Family Values in the Old South. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, pp42. ISBN 9780813034188
2009
- West, E. (2009) Dolly, Maria, Lavinia and Susan: enslaved women in Antebellum South Carolina. In: Spruill, M. , Johnson, J. and Littlefield, V. (eds.) South Carolina women: their life and times. University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, pp. 127-142. ISBN 9780820329352
- West, E. (2009) Gender in eighteenth and nineteenth century America. The Historical Journal, 52 (1). pp. 253-264. ISSN 0018-246X doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X08007395
2007
- West, E. R. (2007) 'She is dissatisfied with her present condition’: requests for voluntary enslavement in the antebellum American south. Slavery and Abolition, 28 (3). pp. 329-350. ISSN 1743-9523 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01440390701685530
2004
- West, E. (2004) Chains of love: slave couples in antebellum South Carolina. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, pp184. ISBN 9780252029035
- West, E. (2004) Tensions, tempers, and temptations: marital discord among slaves in antebellum South Carolina. American Nineteenth Century History, 5 (2). pp. 1-18. ISSN 1466-4658 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1466465042000257837
2000
- West, E. (2000) Masters and marriages, profits and paternalism: slave owners' perspectives on Cross-Plantation Unions in Antebellum South Carolina. Slavery and Abolition, 21 (1). pp. 56-72. ISSN 1743-9523
1999
- West, E. (1999) The Debate on the Strength of Slave Families: South Carolina and the Importance of Cross-Plantation Marriages. Journal of American Studies, 33 (2). pp. 221-241. ISSN 1469-5154
- West, E. (1999) Surviving Separation: Cross-Plantation Marriages and the Slave Trade in Antebellum South Carolina. Journal of Family History, 24 (2). pp. 212-231.
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West, E.
