Regular Speaker Series

Slavery, Emotions and Gender in the Antebellum US South

How might historians of slavery utilise approaches from the history of emotions? What can doing so illuminate about the institution of slavery and the lives of the enslaved? In this short talk and Q&A, Dr Beth Wilson will give an overview of my current book project on slavery, emotions, and gender in the US South, discuss some of the sources, methods, and theoretical approaches she uses to consider emotion in the archive of slavery, and reflect on the challenges and ethical implications of doing this work.

Tennessee Student Activism, 1950s-1960s

“Re-thinking Our Histories of Technology: Racial Capitalism and Transimperial Modernity in the Making of the Modern Bicycle”

Abstract: This paper is a condensed version of the first chapter of Dr Cardon’s forthcoming book, The World Awheel: Americans in the First Bicycle Age (Columbia University Press). It considers how the forces of racial capitalism and transimperial modernity contributed to the production of the bicycle at the end of the nineteenth century. The paper offers a ‘thick description’ of the bicycle as a technology through which one can trace multiple vectors of empire and exploited racialized labor. It places the production of the bicycle within a global network that connects places as divergent as the Connecticut River Valley, Brazil, and Trinidad. In focusing on a relatively mundane object this paper interrogates empire and racial capitalism as entangled forces that contributed to the construction of an everyday technology. A history of technology that is often ignored.

“The Walking Wounded”

Abstract: Activist burnout is a chronic condition and emotional and psychological difficulties, are disquieting facts of activist history that we are yet to acknowledge sufficiently as fallout from the 1960s. In this talk, Sharon Monteith will share some approaches through which she is writing this difficult history.

Sharon Monteith is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and History at Nottingham Trent University. Her most recent book is the award-winning SNCC’s Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South.