Beth Wilson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow who is working on her first book project, Testimonies of Emotion: Enslaved People’s Emotional Lives in the US South. This book focuses attention on enslaved people’s testimony from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to consider how enslaved people created their own gendered emotional ideologies, practices, and modes of emotional expression in the antebellum US South. She has published related articles on gender, slavery, and emotions in American Nineteenth Century History and Slavery and Abolition, and recently co-edited a special issue of Slavery and Abolition, with Emily West, on ‘Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World.’
Beth has previously worked at University of Reading, University of Nottingham, and University of Liverpool, where she taught broadly on the history of race, gender, and resistance in the United States and Atlantic World, specialising in the history of US slavery, gendered experiences of enslavement, and the history of emotions. Beth has also worked extensively with young people, including in collaboration with university widening participation departments and an anti-poverty charity.
Publications
(ed. with E. West) Slavery and emotions in the Atlantic World, special issue, Slavery and Abolition (in press).
'"Her work of love": forced separations, maternal grief, and enslaved mothers' emotional practices in the antebellum US South', Slavery and Abolition, 45:1 (2024), pp. 80-98. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2260184
'"I ain' mad now and I know taint no use to lie": honesty, anger, and emotional resistance in formerly enslaved women's 1930s' testimony', American Nineteenth Century History, 22:3 (2021), pp. 307-326. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2021.2022543
