Professor Emily West

Position

Supernumerary Fellow in History, Brasenose College

Qualifications

BA (Liverpool)
MA (Manchester)
PhD (Liverpool)

Academic Positions

Supernumerary Fellow in History, Brasenose College
Professor of Early American History

Academic Background and Previous Positions

I joined the University of Oxford in September 2024, along with my British Academy-funded Postdoc, Dr Beth Wilson. In 2024-25 I have a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete a monograph for Cambridge University Press.

Other Positions

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS)
Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
I am currently chair of British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH): https://www.branch.org.uk/
I am an associate editor for Slavery and Abolition, and I sit on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of American Studies, and Civil War History. 

Undergraduate Teaching Areas
American History

Graduate Teaching Areas
MSt in History
I welcome research students interested in early American history, especially slavery and gender in the US South.

Research Interests
I am broadly interested in issues of race and gender in American history and my research focusses on US slavery in the US South, especially the lives of enslaved women, the relationships between enslaved spouses, family life under enslavement, and affective ties between enslaved people and free people of colour. I am also interested in motherhood and the history of infant and child feeding, including wet nursing.

Selected Publications

Books
Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, ed. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena P.T. Machado, Diana Paton, Emily West (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
Enslaved Women in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Family or Freedom: The Expulsion and Enslavement of Free People of Color in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012).
Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Articles
‘“We chilluns, long wid her, wuz lak de udder slaves”: Free Black Families and Nominal Slavery in the pre-Civil War US South’. Journal of American Studies, 55, 5 (2021), 991-1018.
‘Fertility Control, Shared Nurturing, and Dual Exploitation: The Lives of Enslaved Mothers in the Antebellum United States’ (with Erin Shearer, UROP student) Women’s History Review 27, 6 (2018), 1006-1020.
‘Reflections on the History and Historians of the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves: Enslaved Women and Intimate Partner Violence’, American Nineteenth Century History, 19, 1 (2018), 1-21.
‘“Mothers’ Milk”: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South’ (with R.J. Knight, UROP student), Journal of Southern History 83, 1 (Feb. 2017), 37-68.
‘Women, Enslavement and Expulsion on the Eve of the American Civil War’ Women’s History Review 22, 3 (June 2013), 460-77.

Book chapters
‘Gender in the Old South’. Co-written with Catherine Clinton in Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography, eds. Craig Thomson Friend and Lorri Glover (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2020).

Digital Exhibitions
‘Hidden Voices: Enslaved women in the Lowcountry and US South’ (with Sian David, former UROP student). Digital history exhibition with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA (2020), 23,831 words: http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/hidden-voices

E-mail
[email protected]

Links
https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/people/emily-west