The 2020 Stephanie M.H. Camp Lecture
Recaptive African Women and the Body Politics of Survival in the Era of the ‘Last Slave Ships’
Sharla M. Fett, Professor of History, Occidental College

May 27, 2020
3:30 PM
Livestream
Register for this event to receive the Zoom link: events.uw.edu/camp2020

In the final decade of the transatlantic slave trade, recaptive Africans seized by U.S. patrols from illegal slave ships found themselves embarked on new and deadly journeys of forced migration to Liberia. To survive the catastrophe of their displacement, recaptive women asserted communal life in the midst of anonymous death through rival use of ship’s spaces and reclamation of their social bodies. This talk merges the history of the body, to which Stephanie M.H. Camp contributed so crucially, with more recent work on black intellectual history in the Atlantic World.

Sharla M. Fett is Professor of History at Occidental College in Los Angeles, working in the fields of Atlantic World slavery and abolition, the antebellum U.S. South, and race, gender & health. She is the author of Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002) and Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships,
Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (2017), both with University of North Carolina Press. She served as major contributing author to the 5th edition of Ellen DuBois and Lynn Dumenil’s Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents (2019) and has been a teaching partner of the Colored Conventions Project, a collaborative digital research site on 19th-century Black organizing.

The Stephanie M.H. Camp Lecture is hosted by the UW Department of History and the UW Libraries. This lecture was established to honor the memory of our beloved colleague, Stephanie M.H. Camp, who was the Donald W. Logan Family Endowed Chair in American History, and the author of the award-winning book Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004). Before her untimely death in 2014, Professor Camp was writing a book about race and beauty. Her work remains a powerful influence on the fields of race, gender, and slavery in and beyond American history. This lecture is made possible by the generous contributions to the Stephanie Camp Lecture Fund for the History of Race and Gender. Support this lecture series at www.giving.uw.edu/StephanieCamp.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by May 17, 2020 to the Department of History at histmain@uw.edu or (206) 543-5790.