American Studies

I completed a MA in History, focusing on slavery from ancient to modern, at the University of Manchester, where I also completed my PhD thesis on Plantation overseers in 18th century Virginia and South Carolina in July 2006. I was awarded an ESRC post doc. in 2006 and then worked as Leverhulme fellow on a project about free people of colour who voluntarily enslaved themselves. From 2008-2010 I worked at Oxford Brookes University as a Lecturer in American History.

My main research interests are in the history of slavery in the colonial and antebellum American South, with particular emphasis on the relationships between slave owners, slaves, and poor whites. My research on groups that have been marginalised in the story of slavery has focused on plantation overseers, slave drivers, indentured servants, female artisans and labourers, and free people of colour. I welcome inquiries from potential research students for the M.A., M.Res., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees, particularly in the areas of colonial British American and Atlantic history, slavery, race, class, and gender in both the colonial and antebellum eras in American history.

My monograph, Between Planter and Slave: The Role of Plantation Overseers in Virginia and South Carolina, 1730-1790, will be published by University of South Carolina Press.

I am writing my second monograph on Slave Stealing and the Law in the American South.

• “Mrs Schad and Mrs Brown: Overseers Wives and their Roles on Slave Plantations in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina,” in Marjorie Spruill, Joan Johnson and Calinda Littlefield (eds),
• South Carolina Women: their Life and Times (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, June 2009)
• “Homemakers Supervisors and Peach-Stealing Bitches: The Role of Overseers’ Wives on Colonial Slave Plantations in Virginia and South Carolina, 1730- 1790,” (forthcoming with Women’s History Review)
• “Supervisors of Small Worlds: The Role of Overseers on Henry Laurens’s Low County Slave Plantations” (submitted to South Carolina Historical Magazine).

• The American Past: Explorations in US History
• Modern History
• Atlantic Frontier: The Americas From Colonies to Republics
• Forging A Nation: The United States From Republic to Reconstruction
• Sources and Debates: The Slave Experience in North America, The New World in Chains: Slavery and the Bonds of Race in America, 1619-1877
• ‘Eyes on the Prize’: The Struggle for Civil Rights in America

I have supervised final year dissertations on slavery, women and the South, native Americans, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. I am happy to discuss dissertation proposals on all aspects of eighteenth and nineteenth-century American history. I am also Level III Dissertation Module Co-ordinator so students should feel free to contact me with any questions about their dissertations.