Dr Aisha Djelid is the Broadbent Career Development Fellow in American History at the RAI and St Edmund Hall. She completed her BA (Hons), MA, and PhD at the University of Reading where she researched slavery and the forced reproduction of enslaved men and women in the antebellum South through the lens of gender, capitalism, and health. This research was published in American Nineteenth Century History and will be published in full in a forthcoming monograph with the University of Georgia Press, which will explore intimate relationships, parenthood, health, marketisation, and the long-term legacies of forced reproduction.
Her new project explores the experiences of enslaved children and considers how and when they developed the ability and desire to resist their enslavement as they grew. It also contemplates the differences (and similarities) between refusal and resistance to understand enslaved children’s unique form of agency in comparison to adults.
She currently sits on the Association of British American Nineteenth Historians (BrANCH) committee as the Equality and Diversity Representative, where she organises the Harriet Tubman Prize and a mentoring scheme for postgraduate researchers and historians of the nineteenth century US.
Bluesky: @aishadjelid.bsky.social
Publications:
“The master whished to reproduce”: slavery, forced intimacy, and enslavers’ interference in sexual relationships in the antebellum South, 1808-1861, American Nineteenth Century History, vol. 25, no. 1 (2024), 21-43.
