“Closer to Freedom: Honoring the Work and Legacy of Stephanie M.H. Camp”
DATE: Thursday, April 30, 2015 & Friday, May 1, 2015
TIME: Please see full schedule
LOCATION: Please see full schedule
This event is being held in memory of Stephanie M.H. Camp, a graduate of Penn’s PhD program in History and the author of Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). The book won the 2005 Lillian Smith Book Award for New Voices in Non-Fiction from the Southern Regional Council, and received an Honorable Mention for the 2005 John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association. It also made an an indelible impact on various fields, including US history, African-American history, comparative slavery, and women’s & gender studies. Please join us as we bring together a diverse group of scholars from around the country for two days of reflection and conversation that will bridge fields, nurture connections, and demonstrate the ongoing vitality of Camp’s contributions.
Sponsored by the Department of History, the Annenberg Seminar in History, the Department of Africana Studies, and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, April 30
4:30-6pm
College Hall Room 209
Reception will follow
Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University
Daina Berry, University of Texas at Austin
Barbara Krauthamer, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
We have made a chapter from Stephanie Camp's book Closer to Freedom, titled "The Intoxication of Pleasurable Amusement: Secret Parties and the Politics of the Body,” available online.
Friday, May 1
9am-5pm
3401 Walnut Street
All sessions will take place in Room 329A (Max Kade Seminar Room)
Breakfast and lunch will be served in 330A (Africana Studies Conference Room)
9:00: Breakfast
9:45: Opening remarks
Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania
10:00-11:45am
Session 1 - Geographies of Containment and Freedom
Session Chair: Heather Williams, University of Pennsylvania
Jim Downs, Connecticut College, "“The Geography of Containment”: Cape Verde, the Caribbean, the Civil War South, and the Making of Epidemiology”
Rashauna Johnson, Dartmouth College , "“Moi piquer toi!”: Commodities, Conflict, and the Slave Cartographies of Rural Louisiana”
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, NYU, “Geographies of Freedom in Colonial Caracas, 1760-1809"
Natasha Lightfoot, Columbia University, “So Far to Leeward”: Eliza Moore’s Circuitous Caribbean Journey to Liberation
12:00: Lunch
1:00-2:45pm
Session 2 - Gender, Movement, and Freedom
Session Chair: Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, University of Delaware, "Claiming The Body Through Escape: Ona Judge Staines, The President's Runaway Slave Woman”
Marisa Fuentes, Rutgers University, "“Jane: Gendered Fugitivity, Space and the Colonial Archive in Bridgetown, Barbados”
Jessica M. Johnson, Michigan State University, "Femmes and Freedom: Violence, Bodies, and Mobility in the Afro-Atlantic World”
Barbara Krauthamer, University of Massachussetts at Amherst, "Liberty's Diaspora: Enslaved and Free Women of African Descent in the Era of the American Revolution”
3-5pm
Session 3 - “The Politics of the Body"
Session Chair: Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania
Laura Rosanne Adderley, Tulane University, "Interpreting Judy Winder: Black Female Response to Sexual Assault in the Era of Atlantic Slavery”
Daina Berry, University of Texas at Austin, "Evaluating Motherhood: Breeding Wenches and the Cost of Female Slavery in Early America”
Deirdre Cooper Owens, Queens College, CUNY, "“Race-making and Baby-making in the Slave South: Examining the Birth of American Gynecology”
Aisha Finch, UCLA, "Undisciplining the Slave Body: Cuban Slaves and the Challenge to Corporeal Rupture”
Sasha Turner, Quinnipiac University, "Slaves’ Bodies as Sources of Cultural Production”