Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

Marisa Fuentes

Dr. Marisa J. Fuentes holds the Presidential Term Chair in African American History at Rutgers University where she brings together scholarship in critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.

She is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive which won the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize, the Berkshires Conference of Women’s Historians First Book Prize, and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. Dispossessed Lives illuminates the lives of enslaved women in Bridgetown, Barbados by reading fragments of traditional archival materials “against the bias grain.” The book interrogates the archive and its historical production to challenge the methods and categories by which historians have analyzed slavery in the Atlantic World, in addition to engaging with larger questions of violence, agency, and gender.

Fuentes's research has been funded by several institutions, including the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, most recently, University of Oxford's Balliol College as the Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow.