VanJessica Gladney

The Penn & Slavery Project

VanJessica has had a longstanding relationship with the Penn & Slavery Project. As one of the original undergraduate researchers, she investigated Penn's connection to slavery by identifying slave owning trustees and faculty, the possibility that enslaved people built Penn's original campus, and the buildings and statues that honor slave owners on its current campus. Because of research, the University of Pennsylvania removed a statue of George Whitefield from its campus. She currently, serves as the project's Digital Historian. In this role she helped develop the PSP Augmented Reality mobile application, and continues to manage the project's website. Both the app and website serve as platforms to feature undergraduate work. She began building the website as the recipient of the Provost's Public History Fellowship (2018-19). During her fellowship she also presented information about throughout the greater Philadelphia area.

Her research was recently featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer as part of the "A More Perfect Union" series, the Perspectives Magazine of the American Historical Association, and in the Science History Institute's podcast Innate: How Science Invented The Myth of Race (upcoming.) 

Domestic Workers & Street Car Segregation

In her first year as a graduate student VanJessica researched the connections between street car segregation legislation and African American women serving as domestic workers in white homes in late-nineteenth-century Georgia. Although she does not plan to study streetcars in the future, that project, drew her attention to how the spaces Black women occupy award or deny them access to agency, freedom, and personhood.

Enslaved women and self-emancipation

Her second-year research paper focused on two specific enslaved women. She conducted research about Jane Johnson's life, who freed herself and her two sons from their owner, and Hannah Crafts, who escaped the same enslaver a few years later. By weaving Crafts's narrative with other archival fragments VanJessica expanded on Jane's enslavement and her life before she arrived in Philadelphia. She also focused on the meaning of Jane Johnson's presence and testimony in the courtroom. It strengthened her claims to freedom and gave her access to personhood. It also illustrated the important role Philadelphia played in pushing the nation toward the Civil War. VanJessica presented this research in a paper titled, "Jane Johnson: Choosing Freedom" at the 2023 Meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic on a panel titled, "Freedom Seekers: Active Players in the Abolitionist Movement."

William Still in Philadelphia

VanJessica's next project shifted her focus to the famed Philadelphian abolitionist William Still who counted Jane Johnson as one of the hundreds of enslaved people he guided to freedom. She served as the historian for the William Still 200 project celebrating the 200th year anniversary of his birth. VanJessica helped create a city-wide tour that followed William Still's journey through nineteenth-century Philadelphia by identifying locations that played a significant role in his development as an author, activist, and abolitionist.

This project and her work with the Penn & Slavery Project shaped her thinking about the intellectual development taking place in 19th-Century Philadelphia. In the fall of 2021, she presented her paper identifying connections between William Still, who was forming his abolitionist thought and helping enslaved people escape, and Penn's medical school professionals, who were producing knowledge in support of the institution of slavery, at the same time, only a few blocks away. 

...

Right now, VanJessica is dissertating, working with a team to formalize the Penn & Slavery Project campus tours, planning events to workshop graduate student Works-in-Progress, and making candles on the weekends.