An insightful roundtable discussion featuring Emily Owens from Brown University and Kaisha Esty from Wesleyan University. These two historians focus on the experiences of enslaved and free women, examining narratives of sexual violence, resistance, legal redress, and survival through meticulous archival excavation. The scholars explore the complex and precarious meaning of consent for Black women in the nineteenth-century as well as its lingering afterlives in the present day.
Emily Owens is the David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. Her first book, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans, was published by University of North Carolina Press in January 2023. Owens has received support from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Charles Warren Center for American History. She is also a proud alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF). At Brown, Owens teaches classes on women's history, the history of slavery in the United States, the history of sexuality, and feminist theory. She eagerly integrates teaching with her work as a fellow at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. She is also the founder and convenor of the Brown Gender History Workshop and a co-convenor of the Brown Legal History Workshop.
Dr. Kaisha Esty
Kaisha Esty is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, History, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She is a recipient of the 2024-2025 American Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). A historian of slavery and its aftermath, sexuality, empire, and Black womanhood in the nineteenth-century, Dr. Esty is working on her first book project, titled, Weaponizing Virtue: Black Women and Intimate Resistance in the Age of U.S. Expansion. She is the author of “I Told Him to Let Me Alone, That He Hurt Me: Black Women and Girls and the Battle Over Labor and Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory,” originally published in Labor: Studies in Working Class History. This article won the Association of Black Women’s Historian’s Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize (2022). Dr. Esty’s articles also appear in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and Slavery & Abolition. Her research has been supported by the AAUW, the Sherman Emerging Scholar Series, the Warren and Beatrice Susman Fellowship, the American Historical Association, the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Concurrent with her AAUW postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Esty is visiting the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University as a Fellow-in-Residence
Camille “Mimi” Borders
Camille Borders is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Princeton University in the History Department and African American Studies Department. Her dissertation explores emotion, pleasure and affect within Black women’s worldmaking in the 19th century. As a 2018 Rhodes Scholar she received an MPhil in US History while working as co-coordinator for the Race and Resistance Program in TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities).
