Slavery North is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Martha McNamara as Associate Director.
A message from Prof. Martha McNamara:
“I am absolutely thrilled to be joining the fantastic community of scholars and practitioners at Slavery North as the Initiative’s Associate Director. Coming to terms with the history, legacy, and enduring impacts of Transatlantic Slavery has rightly moved to the centre of historical and cultural scholarship, but the focus of that work has remained stubbornly fixated on the Southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The history of 300-plus years of slavery in the Northern United States and Canada has, until recently, gone largely unexplored or, worse, replaced with a triumphal narrative that equates life in the North with freedom.
I am super excited to be part of the work to push back on that narrative, reveal the complexities of Northern Slavery, and explore the long shadow it casts into the present. For me, the real power of Slavery North’s work lies in the interdisciplinary and cross-practise, connections being made among scholars, activists, artists, culture workers, and social justice advocates. Understanding the past with all its hardships, triumphs, nuances, and contradictions is vital to making sense – and making change – in our present. We need to communicate those past lived experiences to the broadest possible public by engaging and inspiring people through art, literature, performance, journalism, and community organizing, as well as traditional historical narratives.
Slavery North is a uniquely dynamic intellectual community whose work is recasting the history of Transatlantic Slavery and its legacies. I am particularly eager to meet and work with this year’s cohort of Slavery North Fellows and undergraduate and graduate Research Assistants, to participate in the wonderful conversations that take place at Slavery North and extend across campus and to the public, and, most of all, to enjoy the company of terrific colleagues.”
Bio:
Martha McNamara is an Associate Professor of Public History in the History Department at UMass Amherst. She is a cultural historian of 18th- and 19th- century New England specializing in visual and material culture with a particular interest in the history of slavery and its enduring legacies. From 2007 to 2025 she was Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program at Wellesley College where she taught courses in American art and architectural history, material culture studies, historic preservation, the history of cities, and cultural landscape studies. In 2024 she was the Stern Visiting Professor in Architectural History at Columbia University’s Art History and Archaeology Department.
McNamara received her MA and Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University. She is the author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860 (Johns Hopkins, 2004); co-editor (with Georgia Barnhill) of New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680-1830 (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2012), and co-editor of Amateur Movie-Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2017) which won the 2018 prize for “Best Edited Collection” from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Professor McNamara has been a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale; Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, and Columbia’s Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She is the recipient of grants from the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Henry Luce Foundation. She is a co-Principal Investigator and lead author of “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives: Rethinking Inclusion and Exclusion through the Humanities at Wellesley College,” a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times Grant designed to foster humanities-based critical thinking, reflective scholarship, and civic engagement among students and faculty at Wellesley College. Professor McNamara is also an active public historian working with a variety of non-profit, cultural organizations to promote a critical understanding of the past as a way to make sense of the present.
Currently Professor McNamara is working on two scholarly projects: a book manuscript entitled Tovookan’s Tale: Pictorial Autobiography and Anti-Slavery Narrative in Antebellum America, that examines the life and work of African artist Pedro Tovookan Parris and his experience with slavery and freedom in the 19th-century Atlantic world and a book-length study of the New England landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
