History

How She Begot the Violence: Making Violence Ordinary in the Antebellum Atlantic

Emily Owens is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, where she does research on and teaches about US slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminisms. Her work broadly considers the ways that racism and misogyny get expressed in ordinary—and intimate—life.

Her book, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) tells stories of enslaved women who were conscripted into brothels, concubinage, or the so-called “fancy trade,” to map the architecture of sexual violence in US slavery, and is the winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldua Prize for groundbreaking monograph in women’s studies. Her writing can also be found in Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, South Atlantic Quarterly, Literary Hub and Louisiana History. 

This talk is sponsored by The Charles & Virginia Tangney Fund in partnership with the
Bates History Department