Slavery North invites you to the second in our series of five Fellow Talks in Spring 2025. Professor Jennifer DeClue will share her archival research on the lives of enslaved black women and girls in New England.
This hybrid talk is open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the public.
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 3-4 PM (EDT)
Location: E501 Tower Room, South College, UMass Amherst, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA, USA, 01003
Online via Zoom:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/94720661963
Meeting ID: 947 2066 1963
Speaker: Jennifer DeClue, Visiting Research Professor Fellow, 2024-25
Moderator: Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson, Provost Professor of Art History & Founding Director Slavery North
Lecture: “A Very Likely Negro Girl”: Finding Us in the Archives of Northern Slavery
Lecture abstract:
The archive of Northern Slavery indexes the lives of enslaved black women and girls in records like listings for estate sales, runaway slave newspaper advertisements, and court proceedings. The language used to describe us is often terse and unkind. As black women researchers we can bring tenderness to our examination of these records in ways that enliven devastating archival documentation with a humanity that enslavers denied and a kindness that slavery tried to destroy.
Bio:
Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, Northampton, MA. She specializes in black feminism, chattel slavery, film studies, and the avant-garde. She earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and has been teaching at Smith College since 2015. Her book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema was published in the fall of 2022 and received the Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book Award. She is the recipient of an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship. Her scholarship has been published in the anthologies No Tea, No Shade and Sisters in the Life and in The Black Scholar, Palimpsest, TSQ, and GLQ. She is currently writing a book about black women enslaved in New England and slavery’s afterlife there.
For more information, please contact Emily Davidson (Director of Research and Engagement, Slavery North): [email protected]
