Mélena (Mae) Laudig is a Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center and a PhD Candidate in Religion at Princeton University. Her dissertation, “‘Her Country's Children’: Black Childhood, Religion, and Slavery,” examines how religious institutions, discourses, and communities shaped the experiences of African American children in the long nineteenth century.
Q: How did you become interested in your dissertation topic?
Laudig: I entered graduate school planning to study histories of the nineteenth-century African American missionization/religious colonization of West Africa and the Caribbean. I was gripped by one particular figure: a formerly enslaved Holiness evangelist named Amanda Berry Smith, who adopted West African children while working as a missionary in West Africa in the late nineteenth century. Upon her return to the U.S., Smith opened an orphanage for Black children in Chicago. After learning about Smith’s interests in Black children, I grew interested in the intersection of African American religious history and Black childhood. Over time, I identified a longer and larger story that became my dissertation project, which is titled "'Her Country’s Children’: Black Childhood, Religion, and Slavery.”
Utilizing letters, diaries, institutional records, newspapers, and an array of other source materials, my dissertation traces how the education and care of Black children were interpreted and enacted through religious institutions, on theological terms, and out of spiritual concerns from the early national period through the Civil War era. The project toggles between Pennsylvania and South Carolina and thinks critically about how slavery shaped Black children's religious experiences and informed religious institutional approaches to Black childhood during the period.
Q: Who are the three scholars who most influenced your own work?
Laudig: My scholarly formation is indebted to scholars of slavery and religion who have worked in the aftermath of Albert J. Raboteau’s foundational Slave Religion and who have closely considered the religious cultures of enslaved people with special attention to demography and geography.
Jason R. Young’s Rituals of Resistance powerfully connects religious developments in West Central Africa (particularly the Kongo) and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Young identifies an active “African Atlantic religious complex” that connected the two spaces from the colonial period through the antebellum.
Ras Michael L. Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry traces a history of transformations in enslaved religious cultures in the South Carolina Lowcountry from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Brown astutely discusses the resonances between West and West Central African spiritual beliefs and those that developed in a “New World” context without tying himself to limiting binary frameworks of African cultural survival versus African cultural eradication.
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s The Souls of Womenfolk examines the religious leadership and practices of enslaved women in the Lower South and critiques the male-centric study of Black religious cultures that initiated with W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 schema of Black religion as the (male) preacher, the music, and the frenzy. Through her monograph and her recent state-of-the-field essay “Engendering Slave Religion,” Wells-Oghoghomeh invites scholars to critically examine the religion of enslaved people beyond institutions and beyond the normative markers of Protestantism, which can occlude our view of enslaved women and the African Atlantic dimensions of enslaved religious cultures.
These scholars move us beyond the singular focus on Black Protestantism that has often dominated scholarship on enslaved people's religion and Black American religion in general. They give us a fuller perspective of the African-inspired and creative development of Black religious practices and orientations in the United States.
Q: What is something you’ve read or watched recently that other early Americanists might find interesting?
Laudig: I’m trying to read more historical fiction this year, particularly Toni Morrison’s canon, to which I’m a latecomer. Morrison’s A Mercy is such a powerful representation of the life-worlds of seventeenth-century people of African descent in colonial New England. I was moved by Morrison’s depiction of Black women’s healing knowledge and her rendering of the trauma of enslavement through the register of the spectral.
Q: What do you find most rewarding about the research process?
Laudig: I love pretending that I’m a detective and following archival threads! For example, my second dissertation chapter uses the early nineteenth-century archive of Philadelphia’s Shelter for Coloured Orphans. I found a brother and sister in the orphanage records who were enslaved in South Carolina and sent to the orphanage in Pennsylvania by their enslaver. Using census records and correspondence, I was able to gain a fuller picture of these children’s trajectories, which helped me understand how conditions of unfreedom endured in their lives following their manumissions, even to the extent that one of them worked for their former enslaver as an adult. It’s a privilege to dwell with the stories of historical actors like these and to spend time uncovering more details about their lives.
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Laudig: My time at the McNeil Center has been transformative. As a scholar who focuses on antebellum American religious history, I have intellectually benefited from the opportunity to be in conversation with scholars who work in earlier early America and who approach history from a diversity of perspectives. The resources of the Center have been absolutely critical to finishing my dissertation this year. On a personal scale, I have been so grateful to spend time with such a kind and thoughtful group of peers, mentors, and staff members, and I have felt seen not only as a scholar but as a person.
Mélena (Mae) Laudig is a Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center and a PhD Candidate in Religion at Princeton University. To learn more about her dissertation, visit her bio page.