About

Jennifer L. Morgan is a Silver Professor of History in the department of Social &
Cultural Analysis and the department of History at New York University. In 2024 she is a MacArthur Fellow. Also, in 2024/2025 she is the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at New York Public Library.

She is the author of 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; and of Laboring Women: Gender and
Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004). She is the the co-editor of Connexions: Histories
of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Her recent journal articles include “Reproductive Racial Capitalism” in a special issue of History of the Present co-written and co-edited with Alys Weinbaum, and “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” in Small Axe.  In addition to her archival work as an historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007).

She is currently working on a book about slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—the black woman who sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656; a study of slavery and the emergence of private life in the Early Modern English Atlantic world; and a project on the role of reproductive racial capitalism in the afterlife of slavery.

Morgan served as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. 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.