The 2024 Stephanie M.H. Camp Memorial Lecture by Jennifer L. Morgan (NYU) explores the connections between domestic space, the idea of privacy, and the presence of enslaved women in the early modern world. Drawing on court cases, legislation, and the growth of slavery, Morgan revisits questions of the public/private divide initially raised by an earlier generation of women's historians to consider the impact of slavery in the early modern period upon the development of racially marked notions of private life.
 

She is the author of the Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021) which won the Mary Nickliss Prize in Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians and the Frederick Douglass Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University; and of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).  She is the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016).  Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in in the early modern Black Atlantic.

Morgan served as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture from 2019-2022.  She is the past-Vice President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and is a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians.  She lives in New York City.

The Stephanie M.H. Camp Lecture was established to honor the memory of beloved colleague, Stephanie M.H. Camp, who was the Donald W. Logan Family Endowed Chair in American History and the author of the award-winning book Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004). Her work remains a powerful influence on the fields of race, gender, and slavery in and beyond American history. This lecture is made possible through generous contributions to the Stephanie Camp Lecture Fund for the History of Race and Gender. Help sustain this annual event by making a donation today: bit.ly/CAMPLEC