Emily West (FRHistS, SFHEA) is Professor of Early American History in Oxford's History Faculty and Supernumerary Fellow in History at Brasenose College.
She is broadly interested in issues of race and gender in American history, and her research focuses on slavery in the US South, especially the lives of enslaved women, the relationships between enslaved spouses, family life under enslavement, and affective ties between enslaved people and free people of colour. She is also interested in motherhood and the history of infant and child feeding, including wet nursing.
Emily West is an associate editor for Slavery and Abolition and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of American Studies, and Civil War History. She is currently chair of British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH).
Selected publications
Books
- Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, ed. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena P.T. Machado, Diana Paton, Emily West (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
- Enslaved Women in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Articles and chapters
- ‘“We chilluns, long wid her, wuz lak de udder slaves”: Free Black Families and Nominal Slavery in the pre-Civil War US South’. Journal of American Studies, 55, 5 (2021), 991-1018.
- ‘Gender in the Old South’. Co-written with Catherine Clinton in Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography, eds. Craig Thomson Friend and Lorri Glover (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2020).
- ‘Fertility Control, Shared Nurturing, and Dual Exploitation: The Lives of Enslaved Mothers in the Antebellum United States’ (with Erin Shearer, UROP student) Women’s History Review 27, 6 (2018), 1006-1020.
- (with R.J. Knight) ‘“Mothers’ Milk”: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South’, Journal of Southern History 83, 1 (Feb. 2017), 37-68.
