Shauna Sweeney

Shauna Sweeney joins the department as a historian of Slavery and Freedom, Gender, and the African Diaspora, and was the 2016–2018 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. She is currently working on A Free Enterprise: Market Women, Insurgent Economies and the Making of Caribbean Freedom, a book manuscript that that examines how, in an era when violent subjugation to the plantation economy was enslaved peoples’ primary experience of Atlantic capitalism, they nevertheless vigorously defended a set of customary rights to cultivate, harvest, and sell goods from their own provision grounds. Dr. Sweeney’s work has been supported by a Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and a Mainzer Fellowship from New York University.