Jennifer Morgan

Jennifer L. Morgan is The Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of History in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. She is the recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Award and is currently the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021) which won the Mary Nickliss Prize in Women’s History from the Organization of American Historians and the Frederick Douglass Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

She is also the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in in the early modern Black Atlantic.

Her recent journal articles include “Reproductive Racial Capitalism” in a special issue of History of the Present co-written and co-edited with Alys Weinbaum, and “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” in Small Axe. In addition to her archival work as an historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007).

She is currently working on The Eve of Slavery—a project about slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—the black woman who sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656.

Morgan served as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture from 2019-2022. She is the past-Vice President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and is a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians.