Brenda E. Stevenson
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles

Axel Springer Fellow - Class of Spring 2016

Brenda E. Stevenson is an expert on race and gender, US race riots, and southern and African-American family during the colonial and antebellum eras. Her books include Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1997), which won an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights; The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (1988); and The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the L.A. Riots (2013), which received the OAH James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on US race relations. Her latest book, What is Slavery?, was published in May 2015.

 

Stevenson’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, American Association of University Women, Smithsonian Institution,Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and others. She is also the recipient of the University of California at Los Angeles’ Gold Shield Award for outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service, and the Ida B. Wells Barnett Award for Bravery in Journalism. Most recently she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the John Hope Franklin Fellowship from the National Humanities Center.

Project Description

Fanny’s World of Women: Generations of Enslaved Black Females in North America, 1600-1860

Brenda E. Stevenson’s Academy project is a study of enslaved women and the institution of US slavery from the early colonial era through the Antebellum period. She begins with indigenous forms of female slavery in West and West Central Africa before following the kidnapped girls and women to the “New World.” She then examines subsequent generations of enslaved women. The book is named after Fanny Berry of Virginia’s Southampton County, the indomitable slave woman who, in the 1930s, chronicled the enslaved female “types” she encountered. Stevenson uses innovative methodologies to explore the gender identity and the nature of slave community. Her book brings to light the inner lives of slave women as active participants in their domestic worlds, as leaders in their communities, and as thinkers and artists.

Academy Activities

08 Mar 16

Fellow Spotlight: Brenda E. Stevenson

Brenda E. Stevenson is an expert on race and gender, US race riots, and southern and African-American family during the colonial and antebellum eras. Stevenson’s Academy project is a study of enslaved women and the institution of US slavery from the early colonial era through the Antebellum period ...

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23 May 16

Performing Social Status in Slavery and Freedom

Brenda E. Stevenson’s lecture “Performing Social Status in Slavery and Freedom: Southern Black Marriage Rituals, 1840-1900” explores antebellum slave marriage rites/rights in contrast to some of the ways in which the first generation(s) of freedmen and women interpreted and experie ...

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