Event
"With an Infant at the Breast": Black Mothering and Penal Punishment under the Barbados Apprenticeship System
Brown Bag Session
Halle-Mackenzie Ashby, Johns Hopkins University
Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office.
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Halle-Mackenzie Ashby is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the current African American History Mellon Scholars Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. Her dissertation seeks to trace a history of the state’s interest and interference in Black women’s sexual and reproductive lives by outlining how the concept of “matrilineal inheritance” was reformed within the legal framework of post-emancipation Barbados. Ashby is the former Lead Editor of Taller Electric Marronage, which won the American Studies Association’s 2020 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities. She is also a Diaspora Solidarities Fellow, where she serves as Team Lead of Archipelagos of Marronage, which uses Runaway Slave Ads to explore the meaning of Black fugitives along the Gulf Coast and beyond.