Black Women's History as American History with Tamika Nunley

25 Saint Philip Street,Charleston SC 29424

15 February, 2023

Description

Please join the College of Charleston's Department of History in welcoming Dr. Tamika Nunley for its Annual Black History Month Lecture, "Black Women's History as American History & the Everyday Struggles over Liberty and Justice," on February 15, 2023 at 5:30PM in the Septima Clark Auditorium (Thaddeus Street Education Center Room 118, 25 St. Philip Street). The lecture will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. Registration is not required. This lecture is co-sponsored by the African American Studies Program, the Avery Center for African American History and Culture, Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World, Center for Public Choice and Market Process, Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston, Department of Political Science, Office of Institutional Diversity, and the Women's and Gender Studies Program. Registration is not required. Tamika Nunley is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. Her first book, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) reveals how African American women—enslaved, fugitive, and free—imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Nunley traces how black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington D.C., and illuminates how they contributed to the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America. This book was named the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Book prize winner for best book in African American women's history and the 2021 Pauli Murray Book prize winner for best book in Black intellectual history. Nunley is currently finishing a second book, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia, 1662-1865 with the University of North Carolina Press.